Jaeseung Lee

Minseop Jung, Jaeseung Lee, Jibum Kim

Several studies have attempted to solve traveling salesman problems (TSPs) using various deep learning techniques. Among them, Transformer-based models show state-of-the-art performance even for large-scale Traveling Salesman Problems (TSPs). However, they are based on fully-connected attention models and suffer from large computational complexity and GPU memory usage. Our work is the first CNN-Transformer model based on a CNN embedding layer and partial self-attention for TSP. Our CNN-Transformer model is able to better learn spatial features from input data using a CNN embedding layer compared with the standard Transformer-based models. It also removes considerable redundancy in fully-connected attention models using the proposed partial self-attention. Experimental results show that the proposed CNN embedding layer and partial self-attention are very effective in improving performance and computational complexity. The proposed model exhibits the best performance in real-world datasets and outperforms other existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) Transformer-based models in various aspects. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/cm8908/CNN_Transformer3.

Jaeseung Lee, Woojin Choi, Jibum Kim

Combinatorial optimization problems (COPs) are an important research topic in various fields. In recent times, there have been many attempts to solve COPs using deep learning-based approaches. We propose a novel neural network model that solves COPs involving geometry based on self-attention and a new attention mechanism. The proposed model is designed such that the model efficiently learns point-to-point relationships in COPs involving geometry using self-attention in the encoder. We propose efficient input and output sequence ordering methods that reduce ambiguities such that the model learns the sequences more regularly and effectively. Geometric COPs involve geometric requirements that need to be satisfied. In the decoder, a new masking scheme using domain knowledge is proposed to provide a high penalty when the geometric requirement of the problem is not satisfied. The proposed neural net is a flexible framework that can be applied to various COPs involving geometry. We conduct experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model for three COPs involving geometry: Delaunay triangulation, convex hull, and the planar Traveling Salesman problem. Our experimental results show that the proposed model exhibits competitive performance in finding approximate solutions for solving these problems.