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The recently presented idea to learn heuristics for combinatorial optimization problems is promising as it can save costly development. However, to push this idea towards practical implementation, we need better models and better ways of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-02-08 Wouter Kool , Herke van Hoof , Max Welling

Reinforcement learning-based methods for constructing solutions to combinatorial optimization problems are rapidly approaching the performance of human-designed algorithms. To further narrow the gap, learning-based approaches must…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 André Hottung , Mridul Mahajan , Kevin Tierney

Combinatorial optimization has found applications in numerous fields, from aerospace to transportation planning and economics. The goal is to find an optimal solution among a finite set of possibilities. The well-known challenge one faces…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-06-03 Quentin Cappart , Thierry Moisan , Louis-Martin Rousseau , Isabeau Prémont-Schwarz , Andre Cire

The success of machine learning solutions for reasoning about discrete structures has brought attention to its adoption within combinatorial optimization algorithms. Such approaches generally rely on supervised learning by leveraging…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-17 Ismail R. Alkhouri , George K. Atia , Alvaro Velasquez

Neural Algorithmic Reasoning (NAR) research has demonstrated that graph neural networks (GNNs) could learn to execute classical algorithms. However, most previous approaches have always used a recurrent architecture, where each iteration of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-22 Dobrik Georgiev , JJ Wilson , Davide Buffelli , Pietro Liò

Much as replacing hand-designed features with learned functions has revolutionized how we solve perceptual tasks, we believe learned algorithms will transform how we train models. In this work we focus on general-purpose learned optimizers…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-24 Luke Metz , Niru Maheswaranathan , C. Daniel Freeman , Ben Poole , Jascha Sohl-Dickstein

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful tool for neural combinatorial optimization, enabling models to learn heuristics that solve complex problems without requiring expert knowledge. Despite significant progress, existing RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-14 Mingjun Pan , Guanquan Lin , You-Wei Luo , Bin Zhu , Zhien Dai , Lijun Sun , Chun Yuan

In Nature Machine Intelligence 4, 367 (2022), Schuetz et al provide a scheme to employ graph neural networks (GNN) as a heuristic to solve a variety of classical, NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems. It describes how the network is…

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks · Physics 2023-01-03 Stefan Boettcher

There has been an increasing interest in harnessing deep learning to tackle combinatorial optimization (CO) problems in recent years. Typical CO deep learning approaches leverage the problem structure in the model architecture.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-02-08 Yiwei Bai , Wenting Zhao , Carla P. Gomes

Heuristic design with large language models (LLMs) has emerged as a promising approach for tackling combinatorial optimization problems (COPs). However, existing approaches often rely on manually predefined evolutionary computation (EC)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-25 Yiding Shi , Jianan Zhou , Wen Song , Jieyi Bi , Yaoxin Wu , Zhiguang Cao , Jie Zhang

Combinatorial optimization problems near algorithmic phase transitions represent a fundamental challenge for both classical algorithms and machine learning approaches. Among them, graph coloring stands as a prototypical constraint…

Continual learning aims to learn multiple tasks sequentially while preserving prior knowledge, but faces the challenge of catastrophic forgetting when adapting to new tasks. Recently, approaches leveraging pre-trained models have gained…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-11-12 Quan Cheng , Yuanyu Wan , Lingyu Wu , Chenping Hou , Lijun Zhang

Given a neural network, training data, and a threshold, it was known that it is NP-hard to find weights for the neural network such that the total error is below the threshold. We determine the algorithmic complexity of this fundamental…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2021-11-22 Mikkel Abrahamsen , Linda Kleist , Tillmann Miltzow

Solving combinatorial optimization (CO) on graphs is among the fundamental tasks for upper-stream applications in data mining, machine learning and operations research. Despite the inherent NP-hard challenge for CO, heuristics,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-06-07 Han Lu , Zenan Li , Runzhong Wang , Qibing Ren , Junchi Yan , Xiaokang Yang

Machine Learning algorithms have been extensively researched throughout the last decade, leading to unprecedented advances in a broad range of applications, such as image classification and reconstruction, object recognition, and text…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-12-20 Gustavo H. de Rosa , Mateus Roder , João Paulo Papa , Claudio F. G. dos Santos

This paper aims to predict optimal solutions for combinatorial optimization problems (COPs) via machine learning (ML). To find high-quality solutions efficiently, existing work uses a ML prediction of the optimal solution to guide heuristic…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-01-30 Yunzhuang Shen , Yuan Sun , Xiaodong Li , Andrew Eberhard , Andreas Ernst

The development of artificial intelligence systems with advanced reasoning capabilities represents a persistent and long-standing research question. Traditionally, the primary strategy to address this challenge involved the adoption of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-22 Danilo Numeroso

Combinatorial optimization problems are typically tackled by the branch-and-bound paradigm. We propose a new graph convolutional neural network model for learning branch-and-bound variable selection policies, which leverages the natural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-31 Maxime Gasse , Didier Chételat , Nicola Ferroni , Laurent Charlin , Andrea Lodi

Combinatorial Optimization underpins many real-world applications and yet, designing performant algorithms to solve these complex, typically NP-hard, problems remains a significant research challenge. Reinforcement Learning (RL) provides a…

This paper presents a framework to tackle combinatorial optimization problems using neural networks and reinforcement learning. We focus on the traveling salesman problem (TSP) and train a recurrent network that, given a set of city…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-01-16 Irwan Bello , Hieu Pham , Quoc V. Le , Mohammad Norouzi , Samy Bengio