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A Generative Neural Annealer for Black-Box Combinatorial Optimization

Created by
  • Haebom

Author

Yuan-Hang Zhang, Massimiliano Di Ventra

Outline

This paper proposes a generative, end-to-end solver for black-box combinatorial optimization on NP problems. Inspired by annealing-based algorithms, we treat the black-box objective as an energy function and train a neural network that models the associated Boltzmann distribution. By conditioning on temperature, the neural network captures a continuum of distributions, ranging from nearly uniform at high temperatures to sharply peaking around the global optimum at low temperatures. This allows the network to learn the structure of the energy landscape and facilitate global optimization. When queries are expensive, the temperature-dependent distribution naturally enables data augmentation and improves sample efficiency. When queries are cheap but the problem is difficult, the model effectively "opens" the black box by learning implicit variable interactions. We validate our approach on difficult combinatorial tasks under both limited and unbounded query budgets, demonstrating competitive performance against state-of-the-art black-box optimizers.

Takeaways, Limitations

Takeaways:
We present a novel, efficient and effective solver for black-box combinatorial optimization for NP problems.
Simultaneously improving sample efficiency and solution quality by utilizing an annealing-based approach.
Excellent performance even with limited query budget.
Improving problem-solving performance in black-box problems through implicit variable interaction learning.
Limitations:
Further experiments are needed to evaluate the generalization performance of the proposed method.
Further performance evaluation is needed for specific types of combinatorial optimization problems.
Further analysis is needed on scalability and computational cost for high-dimensional problems.
Verification of generality for various black box functions is required.
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