Neural Combinatorial Optimization for Real-World Routing

Vehicle Routing Problems (VRPs) are a class of NP-hard problems ubiquitous in several real-world logistics scenarios that pose significant challenges for optimization. Neural Combinatorial Optimization (NCO) has emerged as a promising alternative to classical approaches, as it can learn fast heuristics to solve VRPs. However, most research works in NCO for VRPs focus on simplified settings, which do not account for asymmetric distances and travel durations that cannot be derived by simple Euclidean distances and unrealistic data distributions, hindering real-world deployment. This work introduces RRNCO (Real Routing NCO) to bridge the gap of NCO between synthetic and real-world VRPs in the critical aspects of both data and modeling. First, we introduce a new, openly available dataset with real-world data containing a diverse dataset of locations, distances, and duration matrices from 100 cities, considering realistic settings with actual routing distances and durations obtained from Open Source Routing Machine (OSRM). Second, we propose a novel approach that efficiently processes both node and edge features through contextual gating, enabling the construction of more informed node embedding, and we finally incorporate an Adaptation Attention Free Module (AAFM) with neural adaptive bias mechanisms that effectively integrates not only distance matrices but also angular relationships between nodes, allowing our model to capture rich structural information. RRNCO achieves state-of-the-art results in real-world VRPs among NCO methods. We make our dataset and code publicly available at https://github.com/ai4co/real-routing-nco.

Highly Efficient Human Action Recognition with Quantum Genetic Algorithm Optimized Support Vector Machine

In this paper we propose the use of quantum genetic algorithm to optimize the support vector machine (SVM) for human action recognition. The Microsoft Kinect sensor can be used for skeleton tracking, which provides the joints' position data. However, how to extract the motion features for representing the dynamics of a human skeleton is still a challenge due to the complexity of human motion. We present a highly efficient features extraction method for action classification, that is, using the joint angles to represent a human skeleton and calculating the variance of each angle during an action time window. Using the proposed representation, we compared the human action classification accuracy of two approaches, including the optimized SVM based on quantum genetic algorithm and the conventional SVM with grid search. Experimental results on the MSR-12 dataset show that the conventional SVM achieved an accuracy of $ 93.85\% $. The proposed approach outperforms the conventional method with an accuracy of $ 96.15\% $.