Exact Methods for the Travelling Salesperson Problem with Self-Deleting Graphs
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Finding the minimal-cost closed loop on a weighted graph where every vertex is visited exactly once is known as the Travelling Salesperson Problem (TSP). In a recently proposed variant, TSP with Self-Deleting graphs (TSP-SD), visiting a vertex i deletes a set of edges in the graph, preventing their subsequent traversal. Due to the dependency between vertex visits and edge deletion, in TSP-SD the feasibility of a cycle depends on the start node. The best performing solution approaches in the literature rely on a simple problem reformulation to find a backward tour where vertex visits add edges rather than delete them. This paper investigates exact model-based approaches, specifically Constraint Programming (CP), Domain-Independent Dynamic Programming (DIDP), and Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MIP) to solve TSP-SD. We show that simple preprocessing can substantially reduce the options for start/end vertex pairs but typically has a limited positive impact on search performance. Our numerical results demonstrate that the difference between the deletion and addition variants is small for CP and MIP but that the reformulation is critical for DIDP performance. Overall, the DIDP addition model is the best of the exact methods on all test instances and outperforms existing heuristic solvers for small and medium-sized instances while trailing in terms of solution quality on larger instances.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".