用二值自编码器优化组合问题,提升搜索效率与解的质量。
Effectiveness of Binary Autoencoders for QUBO-Based Optimization Problems
- 用二值自编码器学习可行解的紧凑二进制表示,保留原始结构。
- 相比人工编码,新表示使汉明距离更贴近真实解距离,减少无效解。
- 适合需要高效搜索且约束复杂的黑箱组合优化场景。
在黑箱组合优化中,目标评估成本高昂,需在有限预算内找到高质量解。因子分解机结合量子退火(FMQA)从已评估样本构建二次代理模型,并在伊辛机上优化。然而,FMQA要求二值决策变量,对非二值结构如整数排列,二值编码方式显著影响搜索效率。若编码未能反映原始邻域结构,小汉明扰动可能对应原空间中无意义的修改,导致大量不可行解浪费评估。近期研究将FMQA与二值自编码器(bAE)结合,从可行解中学习紧凑二进制隐变量,但其性能提升机制尚不明确。本文以小型旅行商问题为可解释测试平台,发现bAE能准确重构可行路径;相较于相似压缩比的人工编码,其更优地对齐路径距离与潜在汉明距离,小位翻转下邻域更平滑,局部极值更少。这些几何特性解释了为何bAE+FMQA能更快提升近似比,且全程保持可行性,为黑箱优化的潜在表示设计提供指导。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
In black-box combinatorial optimization, objective evaluations are often expensive, so high quality solutions must be found under a limited budget. Factorization machine with quantum annealing (FMQA) builds a quadratic surrogate model from evaluated samples and optimizes it on an Ising machine. However, FMQA requires binary decision variables, and for nonbinary structures such as integer permutations, the choice of binary encoding strongly affects search efficiency. If the encoding fails to reflect the original neighborhood structure, small Hamming moves may not correspond to meaningful modifications in the original solution space, and constrained problems can yield many infeasible candidates that waste evaluations. Recent work combines FMQA with a binary autoencoder (bAE) that learns a compact binary latent code from feasible solutions, yet the mechanism behind its performance gains is unclear. Using a small traveling salesman problem as an interpretable testbed, we show that the bAE reconstructs feasible tours accurately and, compared with manually designed encodings at similar compression, better aligns tour distances with latent Hamming distances, yields smoother neighborhoods under small bit flips, and produces fewer local optima. These geometric properties explain why bAE+FMQA improves the approximation ratio faster while maintaining feasibility throughout optimization, and they provide guidance for designing latent representations for black-box optimization.
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