arXiv Machine Learning

The Optimal Sampler for Diverse TSP Solutions: Characterization, Limits, and Learning

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
Sep 12

Probabilistic Focal Search: Accelerating Bounded-Suboptimal Search via Lower-Bound Advancement

Probabilistic Focal Search (PFS) augments traditional Focal Search by probabilistically choosing between the standard heuristic-guided expansion and expanding the minimum‑f node in OPEN. This strategy advances the lower bound, enlarges the FOCAL frontier, and can dramatically reduce node expansions—up to 90% in some benchmarks such as N‑Puzzle and TSP—especially when long f_min plateaus delay useful FOCAL admissions. An anytime variant, APFS, outperforms other tested anytime algorithms on the Generalized Covering TSP, and the same probabilistic scheduler transfers to Dynamic Potential Search as Probabilistic Dynamic Potential Search (PDPS), though its effectiveness varies by domain and bound.

By Minh Vu Duc, Trung Le Huu, H\`a Minh Ho\`ang, Trung Thanh Nguyen, Phuong Khanh Nguyen, Huynh Thi Thanh Binh
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 22

Leveraging Inference-Time Compute for Diffusion Models via Global Scheduling of Denoising Trajectories

The paper studies how to allocate a fixed computational budget across the denoising steps of diffusion models to improve sample quality at deployment. It shows that the expected benefit of evaluating multiple candidates at a step can be decomposed into a step‑specific sensitivity and a universal sample‑size factor, and that the optimal allocation follows a water‑filling structure. Experiments demonstrate that this allocation achieves the same quality as a uniform strategy while reducing function evaluations by 20–50%.

By Yuan Cao, Yifu Tang, Hangqi Li, Zeyu Zheng
arXiv AI
Jul 15

Connected by Construction: Learning Tractable Near-Tour Marginals for Traveling Salesman Problems

arXiv:2607. 12127v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Learning-based methods for the traveling salesman problem (TSP) are often evaluated through the tours produced after decoding or search, but the learned object itself frequently lives in a surrogate space such as heatmaps, assignments, construction policies, or search-guidance scores.

By Ke Sun, Xinyuan Zhang, Xinwu Qian