Combinatorial optimization problems are encountered in many practical contexts such as logistics and production, but exact solutions are particularly difficult to find and usually NP-hard for considerable problem sizes. To compute approximate solutions, a zoo of generic as well as problem-specific variants of local search is commonly used. However, which variant to apply to which particular problem is difficult to decide even for experts. In this paper we identify three independent algorithmic aspects of such local search algorithms and formalize their sequential selection over an optimization process as Markov Decision Process (MDP). We design a deep graph neural network as policy model for this MDP, yielding a learned controller for local search called NeuroLS. Ample experimental evidence shows that NeuroLS is able to outperform both, well-known general purpose local search controllers from Operations Research as well as latest machine learning-based approaches.

本研究提出了一种名为 NeuroLS 的本地搜索算法控制器，采用深度图神经网络作为策略模型，通过计算机学习方法，能够优于已知常规搜索控制器和最新的机器学习方法，在求解NP困难度的组合优化问题中，取得了比较理想的结果。

学习控制组合优化中的局部搜索