GES-TSP: Graph Edge Sparsification for TSP

[Submitted on 23 Jun 2026]

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Abstract:Solving large-scale instances of the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) exactly is computationally expensive. Researchers often employ graph sparsification methods to improve computational efficiency. Traditional sparsification methods typically rely on fixed heuristics and fail to fully exploit instance-specific structural information. In this paper, we propose Graph Edge Sparsification (GES), a learning-based sparsification approach for Euclidean TSP. By incorporating geometric structural information and combinatorial optimization technology, our proposed method adaptively generates a sparsification graph for different instances, significantly reducing the graph size and accelerating the solving process. Experimental results demonstrate that our sparsification method can prune up to 95% of edges on the MATILDA dataset, while keeping the solution gap within 1% of the optimal value. Moreover, our approach exhibits strong generalization capability on the TSPLIB this http URL some large-scale instances, the pruning rate exceeds 99%, while the optimality gap remains below 1%.

Submission history

From: Tianfeng Chen [view email]
[v1] Tue, 23 Jun 2026 11:13:29 UTC (2,779 KB)