Reinforcement Learning for Combinatorial Optimization: A Survey
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Combinatorial optimization (CO) is the workhorse of numerous important applications in operations research, engineering and other fields and, thus, has been attracting enormous attention from the research community for over a century. Many efficient solutions to common problems involve using hand-crafted heuristics to sequentially construct a solution. Therefore, it is intriguing to see how a combinatorial optimization problem can be formulated as a sequential decision making process and whether efficient heuristics can be implicitly learned by a reinforcement learning agent to find a solution. This survey explores the synergy between CO and reinforcement learning (RL) framework, which can become a promising direction for solving combinatorial problems.
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