Learn to Floorplan through Acquisition of Effective Local Search Heuristics

Automatic heuristic design through reinforcement learning opens a promising direction for solving computationally difficult problems. Unlike most previous works that aimed at solution construction, we explore the possibility of acquiring local search heuristics through massive search experiments. To illustrate the applicability, an agent is trained to perform a walk in the search space by selecting a candidate neighbor solution at each step. Specifically, we target the floorplanning problem, where a neighbor solution is generated through perturbing the sequence pair encoding of a floorplan. Experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of the acquired heuristics as well as the potential of automatic heuristic design.