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Combinatorial optimization finds an optimal solution within a discrete set of variables and constraints. The field has seen tremendous progress both in research and industry. With the success of deep learning in the past decade, a recent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-27 Mehdi Seyfi , Amin Banitalebi-Dehkordi , Zirui Zhou , Yong Zhang

We address the problem of optimizing over functions defined on node subsets in a graph. The optimization of such functions is often a non-trivial task given their combinatorial, black-box and expensive-to-evaluate nature. Although various…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-07 Huidong Liang , Xingchen Wan , Xiaowen Dong

Network interdiction problems are combinatorial optimization problems involving two players: one aims to solve an optimization problem on a network, while the other seeks to modify the network to thwart the first player's objectives. Such…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Lei Zhang , Zhiqian Chen , Chang-Tien Lu , Liang Zhao

Machine learning (ML) approaches are increasingly being used to accelerate combinatorial optimization (CO) problems. We investigate the Set Cover Problem (SCP) and propose Graph-SCP, a graph neural network method that augments existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-10 Zohair Shafi , Benjamin A. Miller , Tina Eliassi-Rad , Rajmonda S. Caceres

Neural models have shown promise in solving NP-hard graph combinatorial optimization (CO) problems. Once trained, they offer fast inference and reasonably high-quality solutions for in-distribution testing instances, but they generally fall…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-26 Jialiang Li , Weitong Chen , Mingyu Guo

This paper proposes a novel hybrid neuro-symbolic framework for the optimal and scalable deployment of component-based applications in the Cloud. The challenge of efficiently mapping application components to virtual machines (VMs) across…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Madalina Erascu

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,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-05 Fan Yao , Renqin Cai , Hongning Wang

Graph partitioning is one of an important set of well-known compute-intense (NP-hard) graph problems that devolve to discrete constrained optimization. We sampled solutions to the problem via two different quantum-ready methods to…

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have struggled to outperform traditional optimization methods on combinatorial problems, limiting their practical impact. We address this gap by introducing a novel chaining procedure for the graph alignment…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-06 Marc Lelarge

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…

A range of quantum algorithms, especially those leveraging variational parameterization and circuit-based optimization, are being studied as alternatives for solving classically intractable combinatorial optimization problems (COPs).…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-06-18 Monit Sharma , Hoong Chuin Lau

Traditional solvers for tackling combinatorial optimization (CO) problems are usually designed by human experts. Recently, there has been a surge of interest in utilizing deep learning, especially deep reinforcement learning, to…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2023-04-13 Shengcai Liu , Yu Zhang , Ke Tang , Xin Yao

In this paper, from a theoretical perspective, we study how powerful graph neural networks (GNNs) can be for learning approximation algorithms for combinatorial problems. To this end, we first establish a new class of GNNs that can solve a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-11 Ryoma Sato , Makoto Yamada , Hisashi Kashima

Combinatorial optimization (CO) on graphs is a classic topic that has been extensively studied across many scientific and industrial fields. Recently, solving CO problems on graphs through learning methods has attracted great attention.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-12-20 Ruibin Zeng , Minglong Lei , Lingfeng Niu , Lan Cheng

We state a combinatorial optimization problem whose feasible solutions define both a decomposition and a node labeling of a given graph. This problem offers a common mathematical abstraction of seemingly unrelated computer vision tasks,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2017-02-22 Evgeny Levinkov , Jonas Uhrig , Siyu Tang , Mohamed Omran , Eldar Insafutdinov , Alexander Kirillov , Carsten Rother , Thomas Brox , Bernt Schiele , Bjoern Andres

Backtracking has been widely used for solving problems in artificial intelligence (AI), including constraint satisfaction problems and combinatorial optimization problems. Good branching heuristics can efficiently improve the performance of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-11-29 Congsong Zhang , Yong Gao , James Nastos

Physics-inspired graph neural networks (PI-GNNs) have been utilized as an efficient unsupervised framework for relaxing combinatorial optimization problems encoded through a specific graph structure and loss, reflecting dependencies between…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Martin Krutský , Gustav Šír , Vyacheslav Kungurtsev , Georgios Korpas

We present a novel neural architecture to solve graph optimization problems where the solution consists of arbitrary node labels, allowing us to solve hard problems like graph coloring. We train our model using reinforcement learning,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-11 Lukas Gianinazzi , Maximilian Fries , Nikoli Dryden , Tal Ben-Nun , Maciej Besta , Torsten Hoefler

Relevant combinatorial optimization problems (COPs) are often NP-hard. While they have been tackled mainly via handcrafted heuristics in the past, advances in neural networks have motivated the development of general methods to learn…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-05 Tim Dernedde , Daniela Thyssens , Sören Dittrich , Maximilian Stubbemann , Lars Schmidt-Thieme

We investigate a link between Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO) problems, laying the groundwork for GNNs to approximate solutions for these computationally challenging tasks. By analyzing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-26 Moshe Eliasof , Eldad Haber