arXiv Machine Learning

CADO: From Imitation to Cost Minimization for Heatmap-based Solvers in Combinatorial Optimization

arXiv:2602. 08210v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Heatmap-based solvers have emerged as a promising paradigm for Combinatorial Optimization (CO).

arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 20

Dichotomous Diffusion Policy Optimization

arXiv:2601. 00898v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Diffusion-based policies have gained growing popularity in solving a wide range of decision-making tasks due to their superior expressiveness and controllable generation during inference.

By Ruiming Liang, Yinan Zheng, Kexin Zheng, Tianyi Tan, Jianxiong Li, Liyuan Mao, Zhihao Wang, Guang Chen, Hangjun Ye, Jingjing Liu, Jinqiao Wang, Xianyuan Zhan
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 7

Step Back to Move Forward: Reflection-Aware Preference Optimization for Visual Generation

The paper introduces Reflection-Aware GRPO (RA‑GRPO), a reinforcement‑learning framework that aligns diffusion generative models with human preferences. It uses Diffusion Reflection to correct intermediate sampling paths by reversing the diffusion process, and Counterfactual Path Synthesis to embed these corrected trajectories into the policy, avoiding extra inference cost. Experiments on text‑to‑image and text‑to‑video models show RA‑GRPO outperforms existing methods, reducing reward hacking and improving generalization while remaining architecture‑agnostic.

By Junlong Wu, Jiuzhou Lin, Jia Sun, Boheng Zhang, Huaiqing Wang, Dewen Fan, Houde Liu, Qianqian Gan, Fan Yang, Tingting Gao
arXiv AI
4d ago

Grab a Coffee: Future-Aware Guidance for Discrete Diffusion with Compiled Objectives

COFFEE is a plug‑and‑play framework that enables future‑aware guidance for discrete diffusion models by separating sequence dependence from the objective. It uses a target‑free carrier to absorb marginal token distributions and a compiled finite‑state model to capture how token combinations affect sequence‑level preferences, allowing global preferences to be transferred to unresolved positions without retraining the diffusion model. The framework supports both hard constraints and learned soft objectives and demonstrates strong control results across symbolic, language, and biological benchmarks.

By Hua (Edward), Xu, Dongxin Li, Gwen Yidou-Weng, Guy Van den Broeck, Wei Wang, Anji Liu
arXiv AI
Jun 3

ASAP: Exploiting the Satisficing Generalization Edge in Neural Combinatorial Optimization

arXiv:2501. 17377v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has emerged as a promising approach for solving Combinatorial Optimization (CO) problems, such as the 3D Bin Packing Problem (3D-BPP), Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP), or Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP), but these neural solvers often exhibit brittleness when facing distribution shifts.

By Han Fang, Paul Weng, Yutong Ban
arXiv AI
3d ago

Diffusion-Augmented Markov Decision Processes for Maximum Entropy Reinforcement Learning

The paper introduces Diffusion-Augmented Markov Decision Processes (DA‑MDPs), a framework that extends Maximum Entropy Reinforcement Learning to diffusion-based policies. DA‑MDPs treat each reverse‑diffusion step as an RL decision, deriving a tractable reverse‑KL bound that decomposes across denoising transitions and yields diffusion‑augmented soft rewards, value functions, and policy objectives. The authors implement this framework with PPO, REPPO, and a maximum‑entropy WPO variant, showing improved continuous‑control performance, higher success rates on manipulation tasks, and memory‑efficient training with action chunking.

By Sebastian Sanokowski, Kaustubh Patil, Majid Khadiv
arXiv AI
Sep 21

Collab-Solver: Collaborative Solving Policy Learning for Mixed-Integer Linear Programming

Collab‑Solver introduces a multi‑agent policy learning framework for mixed‑integer linear programming (MILP) that enables collaborative optimization of multiple solver modules. By modeling the interaction between cut selection and branching as a Stackelberg game, the approach employs a two‑phase learning paradigm—data‑communicated policy pretraining followed by coordinated policy refinement. Experiments on synthetic and large‑scale real‑world MILP datasets show that the jointly learned policies markedly improve solving performance and generalize well across diverse instance sets.

By Siyuan Li, Yifan Yu, Zhihao Zhang, Mengjing Chen, Fangzhou Zhu, Tao Zhong, Peng Liu, Jianye Hao
arXiv AI
Aug 3

RAPiD: Reward-Guided Consistency Distillation of Diffusion Planners for Real-Time Autonomous Driving

arXiv:2602. 07339v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Diffusion-based trajectory planners can model multi-modal driving behavior, but their iterative denoising process introduces a latency bottleneck for real-time closed-loop deployment.

By Ruturaj Reddy, Hrishav Bakul Barua, Junn Yong Loo, Thanh Thi Nguyen, Ganesh Krishnasamy