RL4CO: An Extensive Reinforcement Learning for Combinatorial Optimization Benchmark
Research output: Contributions to collected editions/works › Article in conference proceedings › Research › peer-review
Authors
Combinatorial optimization (CO) is fundamental to several real-world applications, from logistics and scheduling to hardware design and resource allocation. Deep reinforcement learning (RL) has recently shown significant benefits in solving CO problems, reducing reliance on domain expertise and improving computational efficiency. However, the absence of a unified benchmarking framework leads to inconsistent evaluations, limits reproducibility, and increases engineering overhead, raising barriers to adoption for new researchers. To address these challenges, we introduce RL4CO, a unified and extensive benchmark with in-depth library coverage of 27 CO problem environments and 23 state-of-the-art baselines. Built on efficient software libraries and best practices in implementation, RL4CO features modularized implementation and flexible configurations of diverse environments, policy architectures, RL algorithms, and utilities with extensive documentation. RL4CO helps researchers build on existing successes while exploring and developing their own designs, facilitating the entire research process by decoupling science from heavy engineering. We finally provide extensive benchmark studies to inspire new insights and future work. RL4CO has already attracted numerous researchers in the community and is open-sourced at https://github.com/ai4co/rl4co.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | KDD 2025 - Proceedings of the 31st ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining |
| Editors | Luiza Antonie, Jian Pei, Xiaohui Yu |
| Number of pages | 12 |
| Publisher | Association for Computing Machinery |
| Publication date | 03.08.2025 |
| Pages | 5278-5289 |
| ISBN (electronic) | 9798400714542 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 03.08.2025 |
| Event | 31st ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, KDD 2025 - Toronto, Canada Duration: 03.08.2025 → 07.08.2025 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:
© 2025 Association for Computing Machinery. All rights reserved.
- benchmark, combinatorial optimization, neural combinatorial optimization, open research community, reinforcement learning
- Business informatics
Research areas
- Software
- Information Systems
