RL4CO: An Extensive Reinforcement Learning for Combinatorial Optimization Benchmark

Research output: Contributions to collected editions/worksArticle in conference proceedingsResearchpeer-review

Authors

  • Federico Berto
  • Chuanbo Hua
  • Junyoung Park
  • Yining Ma
  • Fanchen Bu
  • Jiarui Wang
  • Haoran Ye
  • Minsu Kim
  • Sanghyeok Choi
  • Nayeli Gast Zepeda
  • André Hottung
  • Jianan Zhou
  • Jieyi Bi
  • Yu Hu
  • Fei Liu
  • Hyeonah Kim
  • Jiwoo Son
  • Haeyeon Kim
  • Davide Angioni
  • Wouter Kool
  • Zhiguang Cao
  • Qingfu Zhang
  • Joungho Kim
  • Jie Zhang
  • Kijung Shin
  • Cathy Wu
  • Sungsoo Ahn
  • Guojie Song
  • Changhyun Kwon
  • Kevin Tierney
  • Lin Xie
  • Jinkyoo Park

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 languageEnglish
Title of host publicationKDD 2025 - Proceedings of the 31st ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining
EditorsLuiza Antonie, Jian Pei, Xiaohui Yu
Number of pages12
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Publication date03.08.2025
Pages5278-5289
ISBN (electronic)9798400714542
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 03.08.2025
Event31st ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, KDD 2025 - Toronto, Canada
Duration: 03.08.202507.08.2025

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2025 Association for Computing Machinery. All rights reserved.

    Research areas

  • benchmark, combinatorial optimization, neural combinatorial optimization, open research community, reinforcement learning
  • Business informatics

DOI