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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

Neural Combinatorial Optimization (NCO) is an emerging domain where deep learning techniques are employed to address combinatorial optimization problems as a standalone solver. Despite their potential, existing NCO methods often suffer from…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2024-08-06 Andoni I. Garmendia , Quentin Cappart , Josu Ceberio , Alexander Mendiburu

Preference optimization is a critical post-training technique used to align large language models (LLMs) with human preferences, typically by fine-tuning on ranked response pairs. While methods like Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) have…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-12 Rhitabrat Pokharel , Yufei Tao , Ameeta Agrawal

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

Neural Combinatorial Optimization (NCO) has mostly focused on learning policies, typically neural networks, that operate on a single candidate solution at a time, either by constructing one from scratch or iteratively improving it. In…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Andoni Irazusta Garmendia , Josu Ceberio , Alexander Mendiburu

Neural solvers have demonstrated remarkable success in combinatorial optimization, often surpassing traditional heuristics in speed, solution quality, and generalization. However, their efficacy deteriorates significantly when confronted…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2025-11-14 Zhanhong Fang , Debing Wang , Jinbiao Chen , Jiahai Wang , Zizhen Zhang

Time series prediction plays a pivotal role across diverse domains such as finance, healthcare, energy systems, and environmental modeling. However, existing approaches often struggle to balance efficiency, scalability, and accuracy,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Xingsheng Chen , Regina Zhang , Bo Gao , Xingwei He , Xiaofeng Liu , Pietro Lio , Kwok-Yan Lam , Siu-Ming Yiu

Recent works have shown the remarkable superiority of transformer models in reinforcement learning (RL), where the decision-making problem is formulated as sequential generation. Transformer-based agents could emerge with self-improvement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Sili Huang , Jifeng Hu , Zhejian Yang , Liwei Yang , Tao Luo , Hechang Chen , Lichao Sun , Bo Yang

Recent progress in Meta-Black-Box-Optimization (MetaBBO) has demonstrated that using RL to learn a meta-level policy for dynamic algorithm configuration (DAC) over an optimization task distribution could significantly enhance the…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2025-05-06 Zeyuan Ma , Zhiguang Cao , Zhou Jiang , Hongshu Guo , Yue-Jiao Gong

Traditional policy learning methods in cooperative pursuit face fundamental challenges in biomimetic underwater robots, where long-horizon decision making, partial observability, and inter-robot coordination require both expressiveness and…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-04-22 Yukai Feng , Zhiheng Wu , Zhengxing Wu , Junwen Gu , Junzhi Yu

We study reinforcement learning from human feedback in general Markov decision processes, where agents learn from trajectory-level preference comparisons. A central challenge in this setting is to design algorithms that select informative…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Andreas Schlaginhaufen , Reda Ouhamma , Maryam Kamgarpour

A key challenge in reinforcement learning (RL) is managing the exploration-exploitation trade-off without sacrificing sample efficiency. Policy gradient (PG) methods excel in exploitation through fine-grained, gradient-based optimization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-18 Zelal Su "Lain" Mustafaoglu , Keshav Pingali , Risto Miikkulainen

Recent deep reinforcement learning methods have achieved remarkable success in solving multi-objective combinatorial optimization problems (MOCOPs) by decomposing them into multiple subproblems, each associated with a specific weight…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Mingfeng Fan , Jianan Zhou , Yifeng Zhang , Yaoxin Wu , Jinbiao Chen , Guillaume Adrien Sartoretti

Transformer-based trajectory optimization methods have demonstrated exceptional performance in offline Reinforcement Learning (offline RL). Yet, it poses challenges due to substantial parameter size and limited scalability, which is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-29 Yang Dai , Oubo Ma , Longfei Zhang , Xingxing Liang , Shengchao Hu , Mengzhu Wang , Shouling Ji , Jincai Huang , Li Shen

We introduce an order-invariant reinforcement learning framework for black-box combinatorial optimization. Classical estimation-of-distribution algorithms (EDAs) often rely on learning explicit variable dependency graphs, which can be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Olivier Goudet , Quentin Suire , Adrien Goëffon , Frédéric Saubion , Sylvain Lamprier

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-23 Ruben Solozabal , Josu Ceberio , Martin Takáč

We present Memory Augmented Policy Optimization (MAPO), a simple and novel way to leverage a memory buffer of promising trajectories to reduce the variance of policy gradient estimate. MAPO is applicable to deterministic environments with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-15 Chen Liang , Mohammad Norouzi , Jonathan Berant , Quoc Le , Ni Lao

Sequential recommendation systems have become a cornerstone of personalized services, adept at modeling the temporal evolution of user preferences by capturing dynamic interaction sequences. Existing approaches predominantly rely on…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-05-15 Qianru Zhang , Honggang Wen , Wei Yuan , Crystal Chen , Menglin Yang , Siu-Ming Yiu , Hongzhi Yin

In neural combinatorial optimization (CO), reinforcement learning (RL) can turn a deep neural net into a fast, powerful heuristic solver of NP-hard problems. This approach has a great potential in practical applications because it allows…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-14 Yeong-Dae Kwon , Jinho Choo , Byoungjip Kim , Iljoo Yoon , Youngjune Gwon , Seungjai Min

In this work we extend the class of Consensus-Based Optimization (CBO) metaheuristic methods by considering memory effects and a random selection strategy. The proposed algorithm iteratively updates a population of particles according to a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-08-16 Giacomo Borghi , Sara Grassi , Lorenzo Pareschi
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