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| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2022
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.02201 |
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| _version_ | 1866914848876527616 |
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| author | Correia, Alvaro H. C. Worrall, Daniel E. Bondesan, Roberto |
| author_facet | Correia, Alvaro H. C. Worrall, Daniel E. Bondesan, Roberto |
| contents | Simulated annealing (SA) is a stochastic global optimisation technique applicable to a wide range of discrete and continuous variable problems. Despite its simplicity, the development of an effective SA optimiser for a given problem hinges on a handful of carefully handpicked components; namely, neighbour proposal distribution and temperature annealing schedule. In this work, we view SA from a reinforcement learning perspective and frame the proposal distribution as a policy, which can be optimised for higher solution quality given a fixed computational budget. We demonstrate that this Neural SA with such a learnt proposal distribution, parametrised by small equivariant neural networks, outperforms SA baselines on a number of problems: Rosenbrock's function, the Knapsack problem, the Bin Packing problem, and the Travelling Salesperson problem. We also show that Neural SA scales well to large problems - generalising to significantly larger problems than the ones seen during training - while achieving comparable performance to popular off-the-shelf solvers and other machine learning methods in terms of solution quality and wall-clock time. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2203_02201 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2022 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Neural Simulated Annealing Correia, Alvaro H. C. Worrall, Daniel E. Bondesan, Roberto Machine Learning Optimization and Control Simulated annealing (SA) is a stochastic global optimisation technique applicable to a wide range of discrete and continuous variable problems. Despite its simplicity, the development of an effective SA optimiser for a given problem hinges on a handful of carefully handpicked components; namely, neighbour proposal distribution and temperature annealing schedule. In this work, we view SA from a reinforcement learning perspective and frame the proposal distribution as a policy, which can be optimised for higher solution quality given a fixed computational budget. We demonstrate that this Neural SA with such a learnt proposal distribution, parametrised by small equivariant neural networks, outperforms SA baselines on a number of problems: Rosenbrock's function, the Knapsack problem, the Bin Packing problem, and the Travelling Salesperson problem. We also show that Neural SA scales well to large problems - generalising to significantly larger problems than the ones seen during training - while achieving comparable performance to popular off-the-shelf solvers and other machine learning methods in terms of solution quality and wall-clock time. |
| title | Neural Simulated Annealing |
| topic | Machine Learning Optimization and Control |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.02201 |