Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

8-2025

Abstract

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.

Keywords

benchmark, combinatorial optimization, neural combinatorial optimization, open research community, reinforcement learning

Discipline

Artificial Intelligence and Robotics | Databases and Information Systems

Research Areas

Intelligent Systems and Optimization

Areas of Excellence

Sustainability

Publication

KDD '25: Proceedings of the 31st ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining V.2, Toronto, Canada, August 3-7,

Volume

2

First Page

5278

Last Page

5289

ISBN

9798400714542

Identifier

10.1145/3711896.3737433

Publisher

ACM

City or Country

New York

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1145/3711896.3737433

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