Related papers: Combinatorial Optimization with Policy Adaptation …
Many traditional algorithms for solving combinatorial optimization problems involve using hand-crafted heuristics that sequentially construct a solution. Such heuristics are designed by domain experts and may often be suboptimal due to the…
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…
We introduce Limited Rollout Beam Search (LRBS), a beam search strategy for deep reinforcement learning (DRL) based combinatorial optimization improvement heuristics. Utilizing pre-trained models on the Euclidean Traveling Salesperson…
Combinatorial optimization problem (COP) over graphs is a fundamental challenge in optimization. Reinforcement learning (RL) has recently emerged as a new framework to tackle these problems and has demonstrated promising results. However,…
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…
We study combinatorial problems with real world applications such as machine scheduling, routing, and assignment. We propose a method that combines Reinforcement Learning (RL) and planning. This method can equally be applied to both the…
This paper presents a framework to tackle constrained combinatorial optimization problems using deep Reinforcement Learning (RL). To this end, we extend the Neural Combinatorial Optimization (NCO) theory in order to deal with constraints in…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for advancing Large Language Models (LLMs), achieving remarkable performance in complex reasoning domains such as mathematics and code generation. However, current RL methods…
Combinatorial optimization problems (COPs) on the graph with real-life applications are canonical challenges in Computer Science. The difficulty of finding quality labels for problem instances holds back leveraging supervised learning…
Branch-and-bound is a systematic enumerative method for combinatorial optimization, where the performance highly relies on the variable selection strategy. State-of-the-art handcrafted heuristic strategies suffer from relatively slow…
This paper gives a detailed review of reinforcement learning (RL) in combinatorial optimization, introduces the history of combinatorial optimization starting in the 1950s, and compares it with the RL algorithms of recent years. This paper…
Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has been used to learn effective heuristics for solving complex combinatorial optimisation problem via policy networks and have demonstrated promising performance. Existing works have focused on solving…
Model-free deep-reinforcement-based learning algorithms have been applied to a range of COPs~\cite{bello2016neural}~\cite{kool2018attention}~\cite{nazari2018reinforcement}. However, these approaches suffer from two key challenges when…
Combinatorial optimization problems like the Traveling Salesman Problem are critical in industry yet NP-hard. Neural Combinatorial Optimization has shown promise, but its reliance on online reinforcement learning (RL) hampers deployment and…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has increasingly been applied to solve real-world planning problems, with progress in handling large state spaces and time horizons. However, a key bottleneck in many domains is that RL methods cannot accommodate…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) traditionally relies on scalar reward signals, limiting its ability to leverage the rich semantic knowledge often available in real-world tasks. In contrast, humans learn efficiently by combining numerical…
Ensuring reliability in modern software systems requires rigorous pre-production testing across highly heterogeneous and evolving environments. Because exhaustive evaluation is infeasible, practitioners must decide how to allocate limited…
Combinatorial Optimization problems are widespread in domains such as logistics, manufacturing, and drug discovery, yet their NP-hard nature makes them computationally challenging. Recent Neural Combinatorial Optimization methods leverage…
Since the 1990s, considerable empirical work has been carried out to train statistical models, such as neural networks (NNs), as learned heuristics for combinatorial optimization (CO) problems. When successful, such an approach eliminates…
Neural Combinatorial Optimization (NCO) has emerged as a promising learning-based paradigm for addressing Vehicle Routing Problems (VRPs) by minimizing the need for extensive manual engineering. While existing NCO methods, trained on…