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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Zeng, Li, Shen, Mutian, Pu, Tianle, Nussinov, Zohar, Feng, Qing, Chen, Chao, Liu, Zhong, Fan, Changjun
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.16665
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Table of Contents:
  • p-spin glasses, characterized by frustrated many-body interactions beyond the conventional pairwise case (p>2), are prototypical disordered systems whose ground-state search is NP-hard and computationally prohibitive for large instances. Solving this problem is not only fundamental for understanding high-order disorder, structural glasses, and topological phases, but also central to a wide spectrum of hard combinatorial optimization tasks. Despite decades of progress, there still lacks an efficient and scalable solver for generic large-scale p-spin models. Here we introduce PLANCK, a physics-inspired deep reinforcement learning framework built on hypergraph neural networks. PLANCK directly optimizes arbitrary high-order interactions, and systematically exploits gauge symmetry throughout both training and inference. Trained exclusively on small synthetic instances, PLANCK exhibits strong zero-shot generalization to systems orders of magnitude larger, and consistently outperforms state-of-the-art thermal annealing methods across all tested structural topologies and coupling distributions. Moreover, without any modification, PLANCK achieves near-optimal solutions for a broad class of NP-hard combinatorial problems, including random k-XORSAT, hypergraph max-cut, and conventional max-cut. The presented framework provides a physics-inspired algorithmic paradigm that bridges statistical mechanics and reinforcement learning. The symmetry-aware design not only advances the tractable frontiers of high-order disordered systems, but also opens a promising avenue for machine-learning-based solvers to tackle previously intractable combinatorial optimization challenges.