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Related papers: Self-Improvement for Neural Combinatorial Optimiza…

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The constructive approach within Neural Combinatorial Optimization (NCO) treats a combinatorial optimization problem as a finite Markov decision process, where solutions are built incrementally through a sequence of decisions guided by a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Jonathan Pirnay , Dominik G. Grimm

The end-to-end neural combinatorial optimization (NCO) method shows promising performance in solving complex combinatorial optimization problems without the need for expert design. However, existing methods struggle with large-scale…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-03 Fu Luo , Xi Lin , Zhenkun Wang , Xialiang Tong , Mingxuan Yuan , Qingfu Zhang

Combinatorial optimization problems, such as scheduling and route planning, are crucial in various industries but are computationally intractable due to their NP-hard nature. Neural Combinatorial Optimization methods leverage machine…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-14 Imanol Echeverria , Maialen Murua , Roberto Santana

Self-improvement has emerged as a state-of-the-art paradigm in Neural Combinatorial Optimization (NCO), where models iteratively refine their policies by generating and imitating high-quality solutions. Despite strong empirical performance,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-15 Laurin Luttmann , Lin Xie

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Arman Mielke , Uwe Bauknecht , Thilo Strauss , Mathias Niepert

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

We introduce a combinatorial optimization-enriched machine learning pipeline and a novel learning paradigm to solve inventory routing problems with stochastic demand and dynamic inventory updates. After each inventory update, our approach…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-02-08 Toni Greif , Louis Bouvier , Christoph M. Flath , Axel Parmentier , Sonja U. K. Rohmer , Thibaut Vidal

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-01 Nasrin Sultana , Jeffrey Chan , Tabinda Sarwar , A. K. Qin

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

Neural Combinatorial Optimization aims to learn to solve a class of combinatorial problems through data-driven methods and notably through employing neural networks by learning the underlying distribution of problem instances. While, so far…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Daniela Thyssens , Tim Dernedde , Wilson Sentanoe , Lars Schmidt-Thieme

We study the problem of learning a good search policy for combinatorial search spaces. We propose retrospective imitation learning, which, after initial training by an expert, improves itself by learning from \textit{retrospective…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-25 Jialin Song , Ravi Lanka , Albert Zhao , Aadyot Bhatnagar , Yisong Yue , Masahiro Ono

Deep Neural Networks and Reinforcement Learning methods have empirically shown great promise in tackling challenging combinatorial problems. In those methods a deep neural network is used as a solution generator which is then trained by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-08 Constantine Caramanis , Dimitris Fotakis , Alkis Kalavasis , Vasilis Kontonis , Christos Tzamos

The traveling salesman problem is a fundamental combinatorial optimization problem with strong exact algorithms. However, as problems scale up, these exact algorithms fail to provide a solution in a reasonable time. To resolve this, current…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-09 Yong Liang Goh , Wee Sun Lee , Xavier Bresson , Thomas Laurent , Nicholas Lim

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

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-24 Yuanyao Chen , Rongsheng Chen , Fu Luo , Zhenkun Wang

This paper introduces a new deep learning approach to approximately solve the Covering Salesman Problem (CSP). In this approach, given the city locations of a CSP as input, a deep neural network model is designed to directly output the…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2021-09-15 Kaiwen Li , Tao Zhang , Rui Wang Yuheng Wang , Yi Han

Neural combinatorial optimization (NCO) has gained significant attention due to the potential of deep learning to efficiently solve combinatorial optimization problems. NCO has been widely applied to job shop scheduling problems (JSPs) with…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-12-19 Igor G. Smit , Yaoxin Wu , Pavel Troubil , Yingqian Zhang , Wim P. M. Nuijten

This work proposes a self-supervised training strategy designed for combinatorial problems. An obstacle in applying supervised paradigms to such problems is the need for costly target solutions often produced with exact solvers. Inspired by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-01 Andrea Corsini , Angelo Porrello , Simone Calderara , Mauro Dell'Amico

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-16 Federico Julian Camerota Verdù , Lorenzo Castelli , Luca Bortolussi

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-19 Joel Oren , Chana Ross , Maksym Lefarov , Felix Richter , Ayal Taitler , Zohar Feldman , Christian Daniel , Dotan Di Castro
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