LINC: Decoupling Local Consequence Scoring from Hidden Matching in Constructive Neural Routing
Read the original on arXiv Machine Learning →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Machine Learning.
The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Machine Learning.
arXiv:2602. 07216v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Neural combinatorial optimization (NCO) trains fast heuristics for routing problems, but planners often need more than a single solve: they ask which stop to drop, which transition to preserve, or which subset of stops to remove if a route is infeasible.
arXiv:2610.27568v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural combinatorial optimization has enabled fast constructive solvers for the Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP), yet most autoregressive m...
Neural combinatorial optimization has enabled fast constructive solvers for the Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP), yet most autoregressive models still construct solutions through sequential...
arXiv:2503. 03137v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Constructive neural combinatorial optimization (NCO) offers a promising paradigm for solving vehicle routing problems (VRPs) by directly learning to construct approximate optimal solutions, thereby reducing reliance on expert knowledge for algorithm design.
The paper investigates why attention-based Pointer Networks, though size‑agnostic, lose performance when applied to different sized Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problems (CVRP). It identifies three causes—node‑density shifts, attention dispersion, and diluted graph context—and evaluates architectural changes on both encoder and decoder sides, including a learned permutation‑invariant graph‑context aggregation. The authors show that entropy‑based attention scaling improves large‑to‑small transfer, while the new aggregation methods best aid small‑to‑large transfer, and they combine these insights into a selector that chooses the optimal model for each train‑test size pair, reducing costs by up to 3.2% across seen and many unseen sizes.
arXiv:2609.36063v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural Combinatorial Optimization (NCO) has achieved strong empirical success, yet the internal mechanisms driving model decisions remain largely une...