arXiv AI By M. Harper Langston, Pierre-David Letourneau, Dalton Jones, Roland Memisevic, Peter Scott, Mingu Lee, Richard A. Lethin, Christopher Lott, Fatih Porikli, Harris Teague

Multiplicative vs. Additive State Coupling in Learned Optimizer Schedules

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The paper studies learned schedules for a continuous penalty relaxation of the MAX-CUT problem by backpropagating through an unrolled classical solver. It compares three architectural variants: a state‑blind schedule, a state‑adaptive bilinear schedule, and an additive ablation. The bilinear schedule generalizes well to larger, out‑of‑distribution instances and outperforms its untrained baseline, whereas the additive model performs similarly to the bilinear model on‑distribution but fails to generalize out‑of‑distribution.

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