Test-Time Adaptation for Unsupervised Combinatorial Optimization

ArXi:2601.21048v2 Announce Type: replace Unsupervised neural combinatorial optimization (NCO) enables learning powerful solvers without access to ground-truth solutions. Existing approaches fall into two disjoint paradigms: models trained for generalization across instances, and instance-specific models optimized independently at test time. While the former are efficient during inference, they lack effective instance-wise adaptability; the latter are flexible but fail to exploit learned inductive structure and are prone to poor local optima.