NeuFACO: Neural Focused Ant Colony Optimization for Traveling Salesman Problem
This is an incremental improvement for combinatorial optimization, specifically targeting the Traveling Salesman Problem.
This paper tackles the Traveling Salesman Problem by proposing NeuFACO, a non-autoregressive framework that combines reinforcement learning with enhanced Ant Colony Optimization, resulting in efficient production of high-quality solutions across diverse instances.
This study presents Neural Focused Ant Colony Optimization (NeuFACO), a non-autoregressive framework for the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) that combines advanced reinforcement learning with enhanced Ant Colony Optimization (ACO). NeuFACO employs Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) with entropy regularization to train a graph neural network for instance-specific heuristic guidance, which is integrated into an optimized ACO framework featuring candidate lists, restricted tour refinement, and scalable local search. By leveraging amortized inference alongside ACO stochastic exploration, NeuFACO efficiently produces high-quality solutions across diverse TSP instances.