Xiaorui Li

Oleksandr Yakovenko, Mahdi Mostajabdaveh, Cheikh Ahmed et al.

Although Vehicle Routing Problems (VRP) are essential to many real-world systems, they remain computationally intractable at scale due to their combinatorial complexity. Traditional heuristics rely on handcrafted rules for local improvements and occasional \textit{jumps} to escape local minima, but often struggle to generalize across diverse instances. We introduce \textbf{COAgents}, a cooperative multi-agent framework that models the search process as a graph: nodes represent solutions, and edges correspond to either local refinements or large perturbations for diversification (i.e., jumps). A \textit{Partial Search Graph} (PSG) is dynamically constructed during search, enabling COAgents to train a Node Selection Agent and a Move Selection Agent to guide intensification, and a Jump Agent to trigger well-timed explorations of new regions. Unlike end-to-end learning approaches, COAgents cleanly separates problem-agnostic search control from compact domain-specific encoding, facilitating adaptability across tasks. Extensive experiments on the CVRP and VRPTW benchmarks show that COAgents remains competitive with several learn-to-search baselines on CVRP and sets a new state of the art among learning-based methods on the more challenging VRPTW instances, reducing the gap to the best-known solutions by 14\% at $N\!=\!100$ and 44\% at $N\!=\!50$ relative to the strongest neural solver (POMO), and by 21\% and 40\% respectively relative to ALNS. Code is available at https://github.com/mahdims/COAgents.

Xiaorui Li, Baolei Cheng, Jianxi Fan et al.

A network can contain numerous spanning trees. If two spanning trees $T_i,T_j$ do not share any common edges, $T_i$ and $T_j$ are said to be pairwisely edge-disjoint. For spanning trees $T_1, T_2, ..., T_m$, if every two of them are pairwisely edge-disjoint, they are called completely edge-independent spanning trees (CEISTs for short). CEISTs can facilitate many network functionalities, and constructing CEISTs as maximally allowed as possible in a given network is a worthy undertaking. In this paper, we establish the maximal number of CEISTs in the locally twisted cube network, and propose an algorithm to construct $\lfloor \frac{n}{2} \rfloor$ CEISTs in $LTQ_n$, the $n$-dimensional locally twisted cube. The proposed algorithm has been actually implemented, and we present the outputs. Network broadcasting in the $LTQ_n$ was simulated using $\lfloor\frac{n}{2}\rfloor$ CEISTs, and the performance compared with broadcasting using a single tree.

Tan Jing, Xiaorui Li, Chao Yao et al.

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) enables learning effective policies from fixed datasets without any environment interaction. Existing methods typically employ policy constraints to mitigate the distribution shift encountered during offline RL training. However, because the scale of the constraints varies across tasks and datasets of differing quality, existing methods must meticulously tune hyperparameters to match each dataset, which is time-consuming and often impractical. We propose Adaptive Scaling of Policy Constraints (ASPC), a second-order differentiable framework that dynamically balances RL and behavior cloning (BC) during training. We theoretically analyze its performance improvement guarantee. In experiments on 39 datasets across four D4RL domains, ASPC using a single hyperparameter configuration outperforms other adaptive constraint methods and state-of-the-art offline RL algorithms that require per-dataset tuning while incurring only minimal computational overhead. The code will be released at https://github.com/Colin-Jing/ASPC.

Zhaosong Lu, Xiaorui Li

In the context of sparse recovery, it is known that most of existing regularizers such as $\ell_1$ suffer from some bias incurred by some leading entries (in magnitude) of the associated vector. To neutralize this bias, we propose a class of models with partial regularizers for recovering a sparse solution of a linear system. We show that every local minimizer of these models is sufficiently sparse or the magnitude of all its nonzero entries is above a uniform constant depending only on the data of the linear system. Moreover, for a class of partial regularizers, any global minimizer of these models is a sparsest solution to the linear system. We also establish some sufficient conditions for local or global recovery of the sparsest solution to the linear system, among which one of the conditions is weaker than the best known restricted isometry property (RIP) condition for sparse recovery by $\ell_1$. In addition, a first-order feasible augmented Lagrangian (FAL) method is proposed for solving these models, in which each subproblem is solved by a nonmonotone proximal gradient (NPG) method. Despite the complication of the partial regularizers, we show that each proximal subproblem in NPG can be solved as a certain number of one-dimensional optimization problems, which usually have a closed-form solution. We also show that any accumulation point of the sequence generated by FAL is a first-order stationary point of the models. Numerical results on compressed sensing and sparse logistic regression demonstrate that the proposed models substantially outperform the widely used ones in the literature in terms of solution quality.