The paper introduces a method for tackling combinatorial optimization (CO) problems—often NP‑hard—by leveraging GFlowNets to sample solutions from the solution space. It designs Markov decision processes tailored to various CO tasks and trains conditional GFlowNets, incorporating efficient training techniques for long‑range credit assignment. Experiments on synthetic and realistic datasets show that these GFlowNet policies can efficiently locate high‑quality solutions, and the implementation is publicly available.
By Dinghuai Zhang, Hanjun Dai, Esmeralda S. Whitammer, Aaron Courville, Yoshua Bengio, Ling Pan
arXiv:2606. 02294v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Operations research practitioners typically tackle NP-hard combinatorial problems using large neighborhood search (LNS), a scalable heuristic that iteratively refines a current solution by locally re-optimizing subsets of its variables.
By Germain Vivier-Ardisson, Laurent Demonet, Axel Parmentier, Mathieu Blondel
arXiv:2310.04363v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Autoregressive large language models (LLMs) compress knowledge from their training data through next-token conditional distributions. This limits t...
By Edward J. Hu, Moksh Jain, Eric Elmoznino, Younesse Kaddar, Guillaume Lajoie, Yoshua Bengio, Esmeralda S. Whitammer
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:2606. 07400v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Many scientific problems require inferring unobserved mechanistic latent states from indirect observations.
By Stefan Ivanovic, Ge Liu, Mohammed El-Kebir
arXiv:2606. 19750v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) is a central approach for improving reasoning capabilities in large language models (LLMs), where training efficiency depends critically on how problems are sampled during optimization.
By Darrien McKenzie, Nicklas Hansen, Xiaolong Wang
arXiv:2505. 04757v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper introduces a novel approach to contextual stochastic optimization, integrating operations research and machine learning to address decision-making under uncertainty.
By Louis Bouvier, Thibault Prunet, Vincent Lecl\`ere, Axel Parmentier
The paper introduces a novel end‑to‑end, size‑agnostic graph reinforcement learning framework for the one‑dimensional bin packing problem (1D‑BPP). It models packing as a Markov decision process on an item‑compatibility graph, where a graph neural network actor‑critic policy learns to merge compatible partial bins. Empirical results on the BPPLIB benchmark show that the learned policy reduces the mean optimality gap of a constructive heuristic from 2.66 % to 2.31 %, performs competitively against other learned methods, and outperforms a state‑of‑the‑art learned solver on the hardest benchmark family.
By M. Asl{\i} Ayd{\i}n
arXiv:2601. 22211v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) with combinatorial action spaces remains challenging because feasible action sets are exponentially large and governed by complex feasibility constraints, making direct policy parameterization impractical.
By Lingkai Kong, Anagha Satish, Hezi Jiang, Akseli Kangaslahti, Andrew Ma, Wenbo Chen, Mingxiao Song, Lily Xu, Milind Tambe
The paper introduces MEMENTO, a memory‑enhanced neural solver that improves routing problem solutions by using online data from repeated attempts to adjust action distributions during inference. It targets NP‑hard routing tasks such as the Traveling Salesman and Capacitated Vehicle Routing problems, outperforming existing tree‑search and policy‑gradient fine‑tuning methods. MEMENTO demonstrates strong scalability and data efficiency, achieving state‑of‑the‑art results on 11 of 12 evaluated tasks and enabling zero‑shot integration with diversity‑based solvers.
By Felix Chalumeau, Refiloe Shabe, Noah De Nicola, Arnu Pretorius, Thomas D. Barrett, Nathan Grinsztajn
arXiv:2609.37381v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Neural simulation-based inference (SBI) has been widely successful in inferring a relatively small number of interpretable parameters from potentially...
By Lars K\"uhmichel, Stefan T. Radev, Bhanu Prasanna Koppolu, Masoumeh Davoudi, Jerry M. Huang, Paul-Christian B\"urkner
The paper introduces Variational Graph-to-Scheduler (VG2S), a framework that applies variational inference to the Job Shop Scheduling Problem (JSSP). By decoupling representation learning from policy optimization using a variational graph encoder and an ELBO-based objective, VG2S improves training stability and robustness to hyperparameter changes. Experiments show that VG2S outperforms state‑of‑the‑art deep reinforcement learning baselines and traditional dispatching rules, especially on large‑scale benchmark instances such as DMU and SWV.
By Seung Heon Oh, Jiwon Baek, Hyunjin Oh, Kiyoung Cho, Heechang Yoon, Jong Hun Woo