Related papers: Benchmarking PtO and PnO Methods in the Predictive…
Combinatorial Optimization (CO) encompasses a wide range of problems that arise in many real-world scenarios. While significant progress has been made in developing learning-based methods for specialized CO problems, a unified model with a…
The predict-then-optimize (PTO) framework is a standard approach in data-driven decision-making, where a decision-maker first estimates an unknown parameter from historical data and then uses this estimate to solve an optimization problem.…
Neural Combinatorial Optimization (NCO) has emerged as a promising approach for NP-hard problems. However, prevailing RL-based methods suffer from low sample efficiency due to sparse rewards and underused solutions. We propose Best-anchored…
Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is a popular deep policy gradient algorithm. In standard implementations, PPO regularizes policy updates with clipped probability ratios, and parameterizes policies with either continuous Gaussian…
We investigate an optimization problem in a queueing system where the service provider selects the optimal service fee p and service capacity \mu to maximize the cumulative expected profit (the service revenue minus the capacity cost and…
Neural combinatorial optimization (NCO) aims at designing problem-independent and efficient neural network-based strategies for solving combinatorial problems. The field recently experienced growth by successfully adapting architectures…
Data-driven approaches to predict-then-optimize decision-making problems seek to mitigate the risk of uncertainty region misspecification in safety-critical settings. Current approaches, however, suffer from considering overly conservative…
Neural Combinatorial Optimization (NCO) is an emerging domain where deep learning techniques are employed to address combinatorial optimization problems as a standalone solver. Despite their potential, existing NCO methods often suffer from…
Cloud computing holds the promise of reduced costs through economies of scale. To realize this promise, cloud computing vendors typically solve sequential resource allocation problems, where customer workloads are packed on shared hardware.…
Many decision processes in artificial intelligence and operations research are modeled by parametric optimization problems whose defining parameters are unknown and must be inferred from observable data. The Predict-Then-Optimize (PtO)…
Recent deep reinforcement learning methods have achieved remarkable success in solving multi-objective combinatorial optimization problems (MOCOPs) by decomposing them into multiple subproblems, each associated with a specific weight…
Combinatorial optimization assumes that all parameters of the optimization problem, e.g. the weights in the objective function is fixed. Often, these weights are mere estimates and increasingly machine learning techniques are used to for…
In neural combinatorial optimization (CO), reinforcement learning (RL) can turn a deep neural net into a fast, powerful heuristic solver of NP-hard problems. This approach has a great potential in practical applications because it allows…
When some parameters of a constrained optimization problem (COP) are uncertain, this gives rise to a predict-then-optimize (PtO) problem, comprising two stages: the prediction of the unknown parameters from contextual information and the…
Combinatorial optimization (CO) problems arise across a broad spectrum of domains, including medicine, logistics, and manufacturing. While exact solutions are often computationally infeasible, many practical applications require…
A general framework of unsupervised learning for combinatorial optimization (CO) is to train a neural network (NN) whose output gives a problem solution by directly optimizing the CO objective. Albeit with some advantages over traditional…
Neural combinatorial optimization (NCO) is a promising learning-based approach to solving various vehicle routing problems without much manual algorithm design. However, the current NCO methods mainly focus on the in-distribution…
Neural Combinatorial Optimization (NCO) has mostly focused on learning policies, typically neural networks, that operate on a single candidate solution at a time, either by constructing one from scratch or iteratively improving it. In…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly embedded in enterprise workflows, yet their performance remains highly sensitive to prompt design. Automatic Prompt Optimization (APO) seeks to mitigate this instability, but existing approaches…
Kernel density estimation is a well known method involving a smoothing parameter (the bandwidth) that needs to be tuned by the user. Although this method has been widely used the bandwidth selection remains a challenging issue in terms of…