Solving NP-Hard Problems on Graphs with Extended AlphaGo Zero

There have been increasing challenges to solve combinatorial optimization problems by machine learning. Khalil et al. proposed an end-to-end reinforcement learning framework, S2V-DQN, which automatically learns graph embeddings to construct solutions to a wide range of problems. To improve the generalization ability of their Q-learning method, we propose a novel learning strategy based on AlphaGo Zero which is a Go engine that achieved a superhuman level without the domain knowledge of the game. Our framework is redesigned for combinatorial problems, where the final reward might take any real number instead of a binary response, win/lose. In experiments conducted for five kinds of NP-hard problems including sc MinimumVertexCover and sc MaxCut, our method is shown to generalize better to various graphs than S2V-DQN. Furthermore, our method can be combined with recently-developed graph neural network (GNN) models such as the Graph Isomorphism Network, resulting in even better performance. This experiment also gives an interesting insight into a suitable choice of GNN models for each task.