Traditional heuristic solvers for the 2D irregular nesting problem share a fundamental limitation: they are blind to polygon geometry, relying on guided brute-force to navigate the continuous placement space with minimal geometrical guidance. In this paper, we argue that Reinforcement Learning is uniquely positioned to overcome this bottleneck.
GeoPAR is a geometry-guided parallel autoregressive reinforcement learning framework designed for large-scale multi-agent combinatorial optimization. It introduces a projection-window sparse geometry mechanism, sparse edge-biased attention, and cache-guided conflict-aware assignment to better model local geometric structures and reduce duplicate task selections. Experiments on heterogeneous vehicle routing and multi-depot pickup-and-delivery problems demonstrate improved zero-shot generalization, fewer rollout steps, and efficient inference.
By Wenjian Wu, Zesheng Jia, Jiaying Tang, Benyuan Yang, Jin Wang
arXiv:2608. 00270v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Neural Combinatorial Optimization (NCO) techniques have emerged as a highly efficient alternative to traditional exact algorithms for solving routing problems such as the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP).
By David Aguado, Daniel Fuertes, Carlos R. del-Blanco, Fernando Jaureguizar
arXiv:2602. 11626v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Learning solution operators on arbitrary geometries remains a central challenge in scientific machine learning, especially for many-query simulation, physics-informed learning, and evolving geometries requiring accurate, geometry-aware predictions at arbitrary spatial locations.
By Wenqian Chen, Zhi-Feng Wei, Yucheng Fu, Michael Penwarden, Pratanu Roy, Panos Stinis
arXiv:2603. 28385v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Maritime surveillance missions, such as search and rescue and environmental monitoring, rely on the efficient allocation of sensing assets over vast and geometrically complex areas.
By Carlos S. Sep\'ulveda, Gonzalo A. Ruz
Existing Vision-Language Models (VLMs) exhibits a critical bottleneck in robust spatial reasoning. Recent reinforcement learning (RL) methods aim to close this gap with verifiable outcomes, yet they suffer from poor credit assignment across intermediate reasoning steps.