Combinatorial Optimization with Policy Adaptation using Latent Space Search

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Chalumeau, Felix, Surana, Shikha, Bonnet, Clement, Grinsztajn, Nathan, Pretorius, Arnu, Laterre, Alexandre, Barrett, Thomas D.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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author Chalumeau, Felix
Surana, Shikha
Bonnet, Clement
Grinsztajn, Nathan
Pretorius, Arnu
Laterre, Alexandre
Barrett, Thomas D.
author_facet Chalumeau, Felix
Surana, Shikha
Bonnet, Clement
Grinsztajn, Nathan
Pretorius, Arnu
Laterre, Alexandre
Barrett, Thomas D.
contents Combinatorial Optimization underpins many real-world applications and yet, designing performant algorithms to solve these complex, typically NP-hard, problems remains a significant research challenge. Reinforcement Learning (RL) provides a versatile framework for designing heuristics across a broad spectrum of problem domains. However, despite notable progress, RL has not yet supplanted industrial solvers as the go-to solution. Current approaches emphasize pre-training heuristics that construct solutions but often rely on search procedures with limited variance, such as stochastically sampling numerous solutions from a single policy or employing computationally expensive fine-tuning of the policy on individual problem instances. Building on the intuition that performant search at inference time should be anticipated during pre-training, we propose COMPASS, a novel RL approach that parameterizes a distribution of diverse and specialized policies conditioned on a continuous latent space. We evaluate COMPASS across three canonical problems - Travelling Salesman, Capacitated Vehicle Routing, and Job-Shop Scheduling - and demonstrate that our search strategy (i) outperforms state-of-the-art approaches on 11 standard benchmarking tasks and (ii) generalizes better, surpassing all other approaches on a set of 18 procedurally transformed instance distributions.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2311_13569
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Combinatorial Optimization with Policy Adaptation using Latent Space Search
Chalumeau, Felix
Surana, Shikha
Bonnet, Clement
Grinsztajn, Nathan
Pretorius, Arnu
Laterre, Alexandre
Barrett, Thomas D.
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Combinatorial Optimization underpins many real-world applications and yet, designing performant algorithms to solve these complex, typically NP-hard, problems remains a significant research challenge. Reinforcement Learning (RL) provides a versatile framework for designing heuristics across a broad spectrum of problem domains. However, despite notable progress, RL has not yet supplanted industrial solvers as the go-to solution. Current approaches emphasize pre-training heuristics that construct solutions but often rely on search procedures with limited variance, such as stochastically sampling numerous solutions from a single policy or employing computationally expensive fine-tuning of the policy on individual problem instances. Building on the intuition that performant search at inference time should be anticipated during pre-training, we propose COMPASS, a novel RL approach that parameterizes a distribution of diverse and specialized policies conditioned on a continuous latent space. We evaluate COMPASS across three canonical problems - Travelling Salesman, Capacitated Vehicle Routing, and Job-Shop Scheduling - and demonstrate that our search strategy (i) outperforms state-of-the-art approaches on 11 standard benchmarking tasks and (ii) generalizes better, surpassing all other approaches on a set of 18 procedurally transformed instance distributions.
title Combinatorial Optimization with Policy Adaptation using Latent Space Search
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.13569