Abstract:
Designing efficient algorithms for combinatorial optimization appears ubiquitously in various scientific fields. Recently, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) frameworks have gained considerable attention as a new approach: they can automate the design of a solver while relying less on sophisticated domain knowledge of the target problem. However, the existing DRL solvers determine the solution using a number of stages proportional to the size of the solution, which severely limits their applicability to large-scale graphs. In this paper, we seek to resolve this issue by proposing a novel DRL scheme where the agent adaptively shrinks or stretch the number of stages by learning to defer the determination of the solution at each stage. We apply the proposed framework, coined Learning what to Defer (LwD), to the maximum independent set (MIS) problem, and demonstrate its significant improvement over the current state-of-the-art DRL scheme. We also show that LwD can outperform the conventional MIS solvers on large-scale graphs having millions of vertices, under a limited time budget.
