arXiv:2604.20236cs.LG2026-04

用机器学习优化旅行商问题的候选边集,大幅压缩规模仍保持高精度。

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

论文配图:Machine Learning-based Two-Stage Graph Sparsification for the Travelling Salesman Problem
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 先合并两种经典方法生成候选边,再用轻量分类器筛选最优边
  • 在50到500个节点上减少37%-47%边数,保留超99.69%关键边
  • 适合大规模TSP求解,尤其对非欧几里得场景更有效

高性能旅行商问题求解器(如LKH)在候选图——一个预先选出的小规模边集——上搜索,而非完整图。现有主流剪枝方法α-最近邻与POPMUSIC各有不足:前者密度高但召回稳定,后者更稀疏但召回随规模下降。二者并集虽填补召回差距,但密度仍远低于完整图,仍有压缩空间。现有学习型剪枝方法需在完整图上评分,成本高且多限于欧氏实例。本文提出两阶段方法:第一阶段取α-最近邻与POPMUSIC并集,达约6N条边,几乎完美召回;关键在于每条边标注来源(α-最近邻、POPMUSIC或两者)。第二阶段训练轻量分类器,仅对单源边进行筛选。因双源边几乎均为最优,分类任务简化为处理单源子集,显著降低难度。在四种距离类型、五种空间分布、50至500规模下,该流程使候选图密度降低37%-47%,保留≥99.69%最优路径边,且在TSP500上以更低密度达到或超过近期仅限欧氏的神经剪枝方法性能。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

High-performance TSP solvers such as Lin-Kernighan-Helsgaun (LKH) search within a \emph{candidate graph} -- a small subset of edges pre-selected for the solver -- rather than over the complete graph. The two leading sparsification heuristics, $α$-Nearest and POPMUSIC, each fall short of the density-coverage balance: $α$-Nearest is dense with stable recall, while POPMUSIC is sparser but its recall degrades with scale. Their union closes the recall gap while remaining far below the complete graph in density, leaving room for further reduction. Existing learning-based sparsifiers score edges on the complete graph, an approach that is expensive and largely limited to Euclidean instances. We propose a two-stage method that inverts this logic. Stage~1 takes the union of $α$-Nearest and POPMUSIC, achieving near-perfect recall at ${\sim}6N$ edges. Crucially, the union annotates each edge with its \emph{source provenance} -- whether it was endorsed by $α$-Nearest, POPMUSIC, or both. Stage~2 trains a lightweight classifier on these annotated edges and prunes the lowest-scoring ones. Because dual-source edges are almost always optimal, the learning problem reduces to filtering the single-source subset -- a substantially easier task than classifying all $O(N^2)$ edges from scratch. Across four distance types, five spatial distributions, and problem sizes from 50 to 500, the pipeline reduces candidate-graph density by $37$-$47\%$ while retaining ${\geq}99.69\%$ of optimal-tour edges, and matches or exceeds the coverage of recent Euclidean-only neural sparsifiers at lower density at TSP500.

旅行商问题图剪枝机器学习组合优化

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