Unveiling the Limits of Learned Local Search Heuristics: Are You the Mightiest of the Meek?
In recent years, combining neural networks with local search heuristics has become popular in the field of combinatorial optimization. Despite its considerable computational demands, this approach has exhibited promising outcomes with minimal manual engineering. However, we have identified three critical limitations in the empirical evaluation of these integration attempts. Firstly, instances with moderate complexity and weak baselines pose a challenge in accurately evaluating the effectiveness of learning-based approaches. Secondly, the absence of an ablation study makes it difficult to quantify and attribute improvements accurately to the deep learning architecture. Lastly, the generalization of learned heuristics across diverse distributions remains underexplored. In this study, we conduct a comprehensive investigation into these identified limitations. Surprisingly, we demonstrate that a simple learned heuristic based on Tabu Search surpasses state-of-the-art (SOTA) learned heuristics in terms of performance and generalizability. Our findings challenge prevailing assumptions and open up exciting avenues for future research and innovation in combinatorial optimization.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Tasks
AttributeCombinatorial OptimizationSimilar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Learning Local Search Heuristics for Boolean Satisfiability
We present an approach to learn SAT solver heuristics from scratch through deep reinforcement learning with a curriculum. In particular, we incorporate a graph neural network in a stochastic local search algorithm to act…
Deep Reinforcement LearningGraph Neural Networkreinforcement-learningReinforcement Learning+2On Monte Carlo Tree Search for Weighted Vertex Coloring
This work presents the first study of using the popular Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) method combined with dedicated heuristics for solving the Weighted Vertex Coloring Problem. Starting with the basic MCTS algorithm, w…
Learning Interpretable Heuristics for WalkSAT
Local search algorithms are well-known methods for solving large, hard instances of the satisfiability problem (SAT). The performance of these algorithms crucially depends on heuristics for setting noise parameters and s…
reinforcement-learningCombining Monte Carlo Tree Search and Heuristic Search for Weighted Vertex Coloring
This work investigates the Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) method combined with dedicated heuristics for solving the Weighted Vertex Coloring Problem. In addition to the basic MCTS algorithm, we study several MCTS variant…
Heuristic SearchLearning to Evolve for Optimization via Stability-Inducing Neural Unrolling
Evolutionary algorithms serve as a powerful paradigm for tackling optimization challenges, yet their reliance on manually engineered heuristics inherently limits their adaptability across diverse landscapes. However, the…