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Gradient search in the space of permutations: an application for the linear ordering problem

Published: 08 July 2020 Publication History

Abstract

Gradient search is a classical technique for optimizing differentiable functions that has gained much relevance recently due to its application on Neural Network training. Despite its popularity, the application of gradient search has been limited to the continuous optimization and its usage in the combinatorial case is confined to a few works, all which tackle the binary search space. In this paper, we present a new approach for applying Gradient Search to the space of permutations. The idea consists of optimizing the expected objective value of a random variable defined over permutations. Such a random variable is distributed according to the Plackett-Luce model, and a gradient search over its continuous parameters is performed. Conducted experiments on a benchmark of the linear ordering problem confirm that the Gradient Search performs better than its counterpart Estimation of Distribution Algorithm: the Plackett-Luce EDA. Moreover, results reveal that the scalability of the Gradient Search is better than that of the PL-EDA.

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  • (2024)A Combinatorial Optimization Framework for Probability-Based Algorithms by Means of Generative ModelsACM Transactions on Evolutionary Learning and Optimization10.1145/36656504:3(1-28)Online publication date: 29-Jul-2024
  • (2022)Comparing Two Samples Through Stochastic Dominance: A Graphical ApproachJournal of Computational and Graphical Statistics10.1080/10618600.2022.208440532:2(551-566)Online publication date: 19-Jul-2022
  • (2022)A diversity-aware memetic algorithm for the linear ordering ProblemMemetic Computing10.1007/s12293-022-00378-514:4(395-409)Online publication date: 16-Oct-2022
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      cover image ACM Conferences
      GECCO '20: Proceedings of the 2020 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference Companion
      July 2020
      1982 pages
      ISBN:9781450371278
      DOI:10.1145/3377929
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      Published: 08 July 2020

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      Author Tags

      1. gradient search
      2. optimization
      3. permutations
      4. symmetric group

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      View all
      • (2024)A Combinatorial Optimization Framework for Probability-Based Algorithms by Means of Generative ModelsACM Transactions on Evolutionary Learning and Optimization10.1145/36656504:3(1-28)Online publication date: 29-Jul-2024
      • (2022)Comparing Two Samples Through Stochastic Dominance: A Graphical ApproachJournal of Computational and Graphical Statistics10.1080/10618600.2022.208440532:2(551-566)Online publication date: 19-Jul-2022
      • (2022)A diversity-aware memetic algorithm for the linear ordering ProblemMemetic Computing10.1007/s12293-022-00378-514:4(395-409)Online publication date: 16-Oct-2022
      • (2021)Leveraging recursive Gumbel-Max trick for approximate inference in combinatorial spacesProceedings of the 35th International Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems10.5555/3540261.3541102(10999-11011)Online publication date: 6-Dec-2021

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