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An Efficient Graph Convolutional Network Technique for the Travelling Salesman Problem

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arxiv 1906.01227 v2 pith:I6HXFJMW submitted 2019-06-04 cs.LG stat.ML

An Efficient Graph Convolutional Network Technique for the Travelling Salesman Problem

classification cs.LG stat.ML
keywords graphapproachproblemconvolutionaldeepefficientlearning-basednodes
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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This paper introduces a new learning-based approach for approximately solving the Travelling Salesman Problem on 2D Euclidean graphs. We use deep Graph Convolutional Networks to build efficient TSP graph representations and output tours in a non-autoregressive manner via highly parallelized beam search. Our approach outperforms all recently proposed autoregressive deep learning techniques in terms of solution quality, inference speed and sample efficiency for problem instances of fixed graph sizes. In particular, we reduce the average optimality gap from 0.52% to 0.01% for 50 nodes, and from 2.26% to 1.39% for 100 nodes. Finally, despite improving upon other learning-based approaches for TSP, our approach falls short of standard Operations Research solvers.

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Cited by 21 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

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  17. Machine Learning-based Two-Stage Graph Sparsification for the Travelling Salesman Problem

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  18. Empowering Targeted Neighborhood Search via Hyper Tour for Large-Scale TSP

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  21. Supplementary Materials to Graph Convolutional Branch and Bound

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