Connected by Construction: Learning Tractable Near-Tour Marginals for Traveling Salesman Problems

Abstract

arXiv:2607.12127v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Learning-based methods for the traveling salesman problem (TSP) are often evaluated through the tours produced after decoding or search, but the learned object itself frequently lives in a surrogate space such as heatmaps, assignments, construction policies, or search-guidance scores. This hides the fundamental question: what Hamiltonian structure has actually been learned before decoding? In this study, we directly answer this question by learning