Enhancing Network by Reinforcement Learning and Neural Confined Local Search

Enhancing Network by Reinforcement Learning and Neural Confined Local Search

Qifu Hu, Ruyang Li, Qi Deng, Yaqian Zhao, Rengang Li

Proceedings of the Thirty-Second International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 2122-2132. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2023/236

It has been found that many real networks, such as power grids and the Internet, are non-robust, i.e., attacking a small set of nodes would cause the paralysis of the entire network. Thus, the Network Enhancement Problem~(NEP), i.e., improving the robustness of a given network by modifying its structure, has attracted increasing attention. Heuristics have been proposed to address NEP. However, a hand-engineered heuristic often has significant performance limitations. A recently proposed model solving NEP by reinforcement learning has shown superior performance than heuristics on in-distribution datasets. However, their model shows considerably inferior out-of-distribution generalization ability when enhancing networks against the degree-based targeted attack. In this paper, we propose a more effective model with stronger generalization ability by incorporating domain knowledge including measurements of local network structures and decision criteria of heuristics. We further design a hierarchical attention model to utilize the network structure directly, where the query range changes from local to global. Finally, we propose neural confined local search~(NCLS) to realize the effective search of a large neighborhood, which exploits a learned model to confine the neighborhood to avoid exhaustive enumeration. We conduct extensive experiments on synthetic and real networks to verify the ability of our models.
Keywords:
Data Mining: DM: Mining graphs
Machine Learning: ML: Deep reinforcement learning
Search: S: Search and machine learning