Organizations: UL, LORIA, Inria · Université de Lorraine, CNRS, Inria, LORIA · UC Santa Barbara · University of California Santa Barbara · UPC · Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya · LORIA, UL, Inria
Abstract
Graph combinatorial optimization (GCO) has attracted growing interest, as many NP-hard problems naturally admit graph formulations, yet their combinatorial explosion renders exact methods computationally intractable. Recent advances in Reinforcement Learning (RL) combined with Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have significantly improved learning-based GCO solvers. However, existing approaches face limitations in both generalization across diverse graph instances and computational scalability as action spaces grow. To address both challenges, we introduce projection agents, a novel RL-GCO approach that operates directly in a continuous GNN-based action embedding space, predicting a desired latent action in a single forward pass and subsequently decoding it into a valid discrete action. Additionally, we enable fair comparison across RL methods through a shared embedding space for both observations and actions. Across diverse benchmarks, our approach achieves up to 16.2x faster inference and up to 40% better generalization than existing solutions using only simple nearest-neighbor decoding, while opening the door to strong RL performance in super-linear decision spaces with multiple interdependent variables. Finally, we release LaGCO-RL, a Python library that automates latent action-space construction and supports existing RL-GCO solutions, promoting reproducibility and adaptation to new GCO benchmarks.
Diffusion-based neural solvers for combinatorial optimization repeatedly re-evaluate dense edge/factor interactions, making inference expensive in wall-clock time and often memory-bound at scale. Inspired by the computational methodologies of many-body physics, we introduce LoRe, a training-free, inference-time drop-in wrapper that enforces per-step interaction-evaluation budgeting: at each iteration, it evaluates only a fixed fraction of interactions by dynamically routing computation to high-conflict or high-uncertainty interactions, instead of using a fixed sparsification (e.g., static kNN graphs or static masks). Under fully inclusive end-to-end wall-clock accounting, LoRe substantially improves scalability on the Maximum Independent Set (MIS) problem, extending feasible inference more than 3× beyond the baseline's out-of-memory limit, delivering a ∼8× speedup and a ∼12× peak-memory reduction, with solution quality preserved in this regime. Demonstrating cross-task generality on the large-scale Traveling Salesperson Problem (TSP) and zero-shot robustness to topology shifts, LoRe achieves a ∼15× speedup at n=1000 with a 44× memory reduction and competitive tour quality.
Group-based reinforcement learning (RL) methods have achieved remarkable success in improving the performance of large language models (LLMs) and have been rapidly extended to agentic tasks. However, their credit assignment relies heavily on coarse-grained trajectory-level attribution according to final outcomes, making it difficult to capture the contribution of individual steps, such as valuable steps obscured within failed trajectories. To uncover latent information and enable more faithful step-level credit assignment, we propose Graph-based Group Policy Optimization (GraphGPO), which first aggregates all rollout trajectories into a unified state-transition graph and then estimates the distance from each state to the task goal using the global information encoded in the graph. Finally, GraphGPO assigns credit to each edge by estimating a graph-based advantage, based on how much the transition reduces the distance to the task goal. In this way, GraphGPO significantly improves training efficiency and achieves state-of-the-art performance across a range of challenging benchmarks.
Neural algorithmic reasoning (NAR) is a paradigm that trains neural networks to execute classic algorithms by supervised learning. Despite its successes, important limitations remain: inability to construct valid solutions without post-processing and to reason about multiple correct ones, poor performance on combinatorial NP-hard problems, and inapplicability to problems for which strong algorithms are not yet known. To address these limitations, we reframe the problem of learning algorithm trajectories as a Markov decision process, which imposes structure on the solution construction procedure and unlocks the powerful tools of imitation and reinforcement learning (RL). We propose the GNARL framework, encompassing the methodology to translate problem formulations from NAR to RL and a learning architecture suitable for a wide range of graph-based problems. We achieve high rates of reaching correct states on several CLRS-30 problems and performance matching or exceeding much narrower NAR approaches for NP-hard problems. Remarkably, GNARL remains applicable when no expert algorithm is available, though reward-driven learning can exhibit greater variability than direct supervision.
Alex Schutz, Victor-Alexandru Darvariu, Efimia Panagiotaki +2