We demonstrate how graph neural networks can be used to solve combinatorial optimization problems. Our approach is broadly applicable to canonical NP-hard problems in the form of quadratic unconstrained binary optimization problems, such as maximum cut, minimum vertex cover, maximum independent set, as well as Ising spin glasses and higher-order generalizations thereof in the form of polynomial unconstrained binary optimization problems. We apply a relaxation strategy to the problem Hamiltonian to generate a differentiable loss function with which we train the graph neural network and apply a simple projection to integer variables once the unsupervised training process has completed. We showcase our approach with numerical results for the canonical maximum cut and maximum independent set problems. We find that the graph neural network optimizer performs on par or outperforms existing solvers, with the ability to scale beyond the state of the art to problems with millions of variables.

本文介绍了如何使用图神经网络来解决组合优化问题，包括最大割、最小顶点覆盖和最大独立集等一些组合优化问题。通过在问题哈密顿量上应用松弛策略，我们生成了一个可区分的损失函数，并在无监督训练过程结束后对整数变量进行简单的投影。实验表明，我们的方法在解决包含数百万个变量的问题时能够胜任。

物理启发图神经网络的组合优化