Related papers: Scaling Combinatorial Optimization Neural Improvem…
Combinatorial Optimization underpins many real-world applications and yet, designing performant algorithms to solve these complex, typically NP-hard, problems remains a significant research challenge. Reinforcement Learning (RL) provides a…
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 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…
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…
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…
Neural approaches for combinatorial optimization (CO) equip a learning mechanism to discover powerful heuristics for solving complex real-world problems. While neural approaches capable of high-quality solutions in a single shot are…
The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into evolutionary frameworks has established a new paradigm for automated heuristic discovery. Despite their promise, these methods typically search in the discrete space of program syntax,…
Existing approaches to enforcing design constraints in Reinforcement Learning (RL) applications often rely on training-time penalties in the reward function or training/inference-time invalid action masking, but these methods either cannot…
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…
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…
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…
Recently, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) models have shown promising results in solving NP-hard Combinatorial Optimization (CO) problems. However, most DRL solvers can only scale to a few hundreds of nodes for combinatorial optimization…
Online ride-hailing platforms aim to deliver efficient mobility-on-demand services, often facing challenges in balancing dynamic and spatially heterogeneous supply and demand. Existing methods typically fall into two categories:…
This paper addresses the Restricted Longest Common Subsequence (RLCS) problem, an extension of the well-known Longest Common Subsequence (LCS) problem. This problem has significant applications in bioinformatics, particularly for…
Current methods for end-to-end constructive neural combinatorial optimization usually train a policy using behavior cloning from expert solutions or policy gradient methods from reinforcement learning. While behavior cloning is…
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…
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…
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…
Recent studies in using deep learning to solve routing problems focus on construction heuristics, the solutions of which are still far from optimality. Improvement heuristics have great potential to narrow this gap by iteratively refining a…
Combinatorial optimization is widely applied in a number of areas nowadays. Unfortunately, many combinatorial optimization problems are NP-hard which usually means that they are unsolvable in practice. However, it is often unnecessary to…