Papers › Hybrid Pointer Networks for Traveling Salesman Problems Optimization

Hybrid Pointer Networks for Traveling Salesman Problems Optimization

6 Oct 2021arXiv:2110.03104archive 2025-07-28

Ahmed Stohy, Heba-Tullah Abdelhakam, Sayed Ali, Mohammed Elhenawy, Abdallah A Hassan, Mahmoud Masoud, Sebastien Glaser, Andry Rakotonirainy

In this work, a novel idea is presented for combinatorial optimization problems, a hybrid network, which results in a superior outcome. We applied this method to graph pointer networks [1], expanding its capabilities to a higher level. We proposed a hybrid pointer network (HPN) to solve the travelling salesman problem trained by reinforcement learning. Furthermore, HPN builds upon graph pointer networks which is an extension of pointer networks with an additional graph embedding layer. HPN outperforms the graph pointer network in solution quality due to the hybrid encoder, which provides our model with a verity encoding type, allowing our model to converge to a better policy. Our network significantly outperforms the original graph pointer network for small and large-scale problems increasing its performance for TSP50 from 5.959 to 5.706 without utilizing 2opt, Pointer networks, Attention model, and a wide range of models, producing results comparable to highly tuned and specialized algorithms. We make our data, models, and code publicly available [2].

PaperPDFCode

Code

ahmedstohy/hybrid-pointer-networks officialmentioned in paperpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Combinatorial OptimizationGraph EmbeddingTraveling Salesman Problem

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

LSTMPointer NetworkSigmoid ActivationSoftmaxTanh Activation

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections