Ant Colony Sampling with GFlowNets for Combinatorial Optimization

Minsu Kim, Sanghyeok Choi, Hyeonah Kim, Jiwoo Son, Jinkyoo Park, Yoshua Bengio

Abstract: We present the Generative Flow Ant Colony Sampler (GFACS), a novel meta-heuristic method that hierarchically combines amortized inference and parallel stochastic search. Our method first leverages Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) to amortize a multi-modal prior distribution over combinatorial solution space that encompasses both high-reward and diversified solutions. This prior is iteratively updated via parallel stochastic search in the spirit of Ant Colony Optimization (ACO), leading to the posterior distribution that generates near-optimal solutions. Extensive experiments across seven combinatorial optimization problems demonstrate GFACS's promising performances.

Submission Number: 162