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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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Zijun Liao , Jinbiao Chen , Debing Wang , Zizhen Zhang , Jiahai Wang

We study the problem of learning sequential decision-making policies in settings with multiple state-action representations. Such settings naturally arise in many domains, such as planning (e.g., multiple integer programming formulations)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-11 Jialin Song , Ravi Lanka , Yisong Yue , Masahiro Ono

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-22 Fei Liu , Xi Lin , Weiduo Liao , Zhenkun Wang , Qingfu Zhang , Xialiang Tong , Mingxuan Yuan

In reinforcement learning, agents often learn policies for specific tasks without the ability to generalize this knowledge to related tasks. This paper introduces an algorithm that attempts to address this limitation by decomposing neural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-16 Mahdi Alikhasi , Levi H. S. Lelis

Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) for Combinatorial Optimization (CO) is an emerging paradigm for solving combinatorial problems using neural networks. In this paper, we address a central challenge of SSL for CO: solving problems with discrete…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-16 Nikolaos Karalias , Akbar Rafiey , Yifei Xu , Zhishang Luo , Behrooz Tahmasebi , Connie Jiang , Stefanie Jegelka

Over the recent years, reinforcement learning (RL) starts to show promising results in tackling combinatorial optimization (CO) problems, in particular when coupled with curriculum learning to facilitate training. Despite emerging empirical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-07 Runlong Zhou , Zelin He , Yuandong Tian , Yi Wu , Simon S. Du

Unsupervised neural combinatorial optimization (NCO) offers an appealing alternative to supervised approaches by training learning-based solvers without ground-truth solutions, directly minimizing instance objectives and constraint…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Kien X. Nguyen , Ilya Safro

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

Finding a feasible and prompt solution to the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) is a prerequisite for efficient freight transportation, seamless logistics, and sustainable mobility. Traditional optimization methods reach their limits when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-08 Elija Deineko , Carina Kehrt

Despite the success of neural-based combinatorial optimization methods for end-to-end heuristic learning, out-of-distribution generalization remains a challenge. In this paper, we present a novel formulation of Combinatorial Optimization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-02 Darko Drakulic , Sofia Michel , Florian Mai , Arnaud Sors , Jean-Marc Andreoli

In class-incremental semantic segmentation, we have no access to the labeled data of previous tasks. Therefore, when incrementally learning new classes, deep neural networks suffer from catastrophic forgetting of previously learned…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-03-14 Lu Yu , Xialei Liu , Joost van de Weijer

Learning good representations without supervision is still an open issue in machine learning, and is particularly challenging for speech signals, which are often characterized by long sequences with a complex hierarchical structure. Some…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-04-09 Santiago Pascual , Mirco Ravanelli , Joan Serrà , Antonio Bonafonte , Yoshua Bengio

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

Neural combinatorial optimization (NCO) is a promising learning-based approach for solving challenging combinatorial optimization problems without specialized algorithm design by experts. However, most constructive NCO methods cannot solve…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-17 Fu Luo , Xi Lin , Fei Liu , Qingfu Zhang , Zhenkun Wang

Combinatorial Optimization (CO) has been a long-standing challenging research topic featured by its NP-hard nature. Traditionally such problems are approximately solved with heuristic algorithms which are usually fast but may sacrifice the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-26 Runzhong Wang , Zhigang Hua , Gan Liu , Jiayi Zhang , Junchi Yan , Feng Qi , Shuang Yang , Jun Zhou , Xiaokang Yang

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

Efficient sampling from constraint manifolds, and thereby generating a diverse set of solutions for feasibility problems, is a fundamental challenge. We consider the case where a problem is factored, that is, the underlying nonlinear…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-03-30 Joaquim Ortiz-Haro , Valentin N. Hartmann , Ozgur S. Oguz , Marc Toussaint

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

Recent studies have revealed that neural combinatorial optimization (NCO) has advantages over conventional algorithms in many combinatorial optimization problems such as routing, but it is less efficient for more complicated optimization…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-11-15 Dongda Li , Zhaoquan Gu , Yuexuan Wang , Changwei Ren , Francis C. M. Lau

Multiobjective combinatorial optimization (MOCO) problems can be found in many real-world applications. However, exactly solving these problems would be very challenging, particularly when they are NP-hard. Many handcrafted heuristic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-10 Xi Lin , Zhiyuan Yang , Qingfu Zhang