LocalEscaper: A Weakly-supervised Framework with Regional Reconstruction for Scalable Neural TSP Solvers

Neural solvers have shown significant potential in solving the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP), yet current approaches face significant challenges. Supervised learning (SL)-based solvers require large amounts of high-quality labeled data, while reinforcement learning (RL)-based solvers, though less dependent on such data, often suffer from inefficiencies. To address these limitations, we propose LocalEscaper, a novel weakly-supervised learning framework for large-scale TSP. LocalEscaper effectively combines the advantages of both SL and RL, enabling effective training on datasets with low-quality labels. To further enhance solution quality, we introduce a regional reconstruction strategy, which mitigates the problem of local optima, a common issue in existing local reconstruction methods. Additionally, we propose a linear-complexity attention mechanism that reduces computational overhead, enabling the efficient solution of large-scale TSPs without sacrificing performance. Experimental results on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that LocalEscaper outperforms existing neural solvers, achieving state-of-the-art results. Notably, it sets a new benchmark for scalability and efficiency, solving TSP instances with up to 50,000 cities.

@article{wen2025_2502.12484,
  title={ LocalEscaper: A Weakly-supervised Framework with Regional Reconstruction for Scalable Neural TSP Solvers },
  author={ Junrui Wen and Yifei Li and Bart Selman and Kun He },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.12484},
  year={ 2025 }
}