HyCO：结合强化学习与扩散模型的混合神经组合优化求解器

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Abstract:Sequential reinforcement learning (RL) solvers and global diffusion model (DM) solvers for neural combinatorial optimization exhibit complementary failure modes under an optimization-regret view. The former enjoys small marginal regret in the early construction stage, but suffers from horizon-wise compounding errors with super-linear regret growth; the latter avoids horizon compounding but incurs linear or sublinear regret w.r.t. the dimension of the remaining unsolved subspace. We propose Hybrid Neural Solver for Combinatorial Optimization (HyCO), a hybrid inference algorithm that constructs a solution prefix with an RL solver and adaptively switches to a conditional DM to complete the remaining decisions. To characterize why such hybridization helps, when to trigger the handover, and how to realize it in practice, we first develop a unified error-scaling theoretical framework and prove that, under explicit error-scaling assumptions, i) the hybrid structure achieves strictly lower expected regret than either backbone alone, and ii) there exists a unique optimal trigger step that minimizes the hybrid regret. We then design a lightweight adaptive trigger that combines policy entropy and RL-DM disagreement to detect trajectory-level signals of the regime shift as a practical proxy, since the optimal trigger step is defined at the expected-regret level and is not directly computable on individual trajectories. Experimental results on diverse benchmarks demonstrate that HyCO achieves consistent improvements over both backbones and support the empirical effectiveness of adaptive triggering. Our code and checkpoints are available at this https URL.

Submission history

From: Yuheng Li [view email]
[v1] Mon, 7 Sep 2026 21:11:09 UTC (1,176 KB)
[v2] Thu, 29 Oct 2026 21:54:59 UTC (1,178 KB)