Compute Time Scaling with Recursive Models for Combinatorial Optimization

Zhengxi Zhang, Paul Swoboda

We propose Tiny Recursive Models for Combinatorial Optimization (\ours{}), a general neural method for combinatorial optimization that scales both depth (how often we recursively invoke our network) and width (how much we sample in parallel). Both are fundamental for combinatorial optimization: hard instances demand a large amount of compute, while a small network is essential to avoid overfitting and capture the algorithmic essence of optimization. In particular, our method consists of a graph-aware tiny recursive model that iterates on a latent state with adaptive halting and needs only a lightweight problem-specific decoder. Compared with previous heatmap-based general neural solvers, it achieves a better balance between solution quality and inference speed on both the Traveling Salesman Problem~(TSP) and the Maximum Independent Set~(MIS) problem, and remains competitive with hybrid methods that combine neural components with heuristics specific to each problem. With the same backbone architecture for both tasks, \ours{} outperforms every diffusion-based solver on TSP from 500 to 10,000 cities at a lower inference cost, and on the standard Erdős--Rényi-[700-800] MIS benchmark…