Small Shifts, Large Gains: Unlocking Traditional TSP Heuristic Guided-Sampling via Unsupervised Neural Instance Modification

The Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) is one of the most representative NP-hard problems in route planning and a long-standing benchmark in combinatorial optimization. Traditional heuristic tour constructors, such as Farthest or Nearest Insertion, are computationally efficient and highly practical, but their deterministic behavior limits exploration and often leads to local optima. In contrast, neural-based heuristic tour constructors alleviate this issue through guided-sampling and typically achieve superior solution quality, but at the cost of extensive training and reliance on ground-truth supervision, hindering their practical use. To bridge this gap, we propose TSP-MDF, a novel instance modification framework that equips traditional deterministic heuristic tour constructors with guided-sampling capability. Specifically, TSP-MDF introduces a neural-based instance modifier that strategically shifts node coordinates to sample multiple modified instances, on which the base traditional heuristic tour constructor constructs tours that are mapped back to the original instance, allowing traditional tour constructors to explore higher-quality tours and escape local optima. At the same time, benefiting from our instance modification formulation, the neural-based instance modifier can be trained efficiently without any ground-truth supervision, ensuring the framework maintains practicality. Extensive experiments on large-scale TSP benchmarks and real-world benchmarks demonstrate that TSP-MDF significantly improves the performance of traditional heuristics tour constructors, achieving solution quality comparable to neural-based heuristic tour constructors, but with an extremely short training time.

A2RAG: Adaptive Agentic Graph Retrieval for Cost-Aware and Reliable Reasoning

Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation (Graph-RAG) enhances multihop question answering by organizing corpora into knowledge graphs and routing evidence through relational structure. However, practical deployments face two persistent bottlenecks: (i) mixed-difficulty workloads where one-size-fits-all retrieval either wastes cost on easy queries or fails on hard multihop cases, and (ii) extraction loss, where graph abstraction omits fine-grained qualifiers that remain only in source text. We present A2RAG, an adaptive-and-agentic GraphRAG framework for cost-aware and reliable reasoning. A2RAG couples an adaptive controller that verifies evidence sufficiency and triggers targeted refinement only when necessary, with an agentic retriever that progressively escalates retrieval effort and maps graph signals back to provenance text to remain robust under extraction loss and incomplete graphs. Experiments on HotpotQA and 2WikiMultiHopQA demonstrate that A2RAG achieves +9.9/+11.8 absolute gains in Recall@2, while cutting token consumption and end-to-end latency by about 50% relative to iterative multihop baselines.

Inference-to-complete: A High-performance and Programmable Data-plane Co-processor for Neural-network-driven Traffic Analysis

Neural-networks-driven intelligent data-plane (NN-driven IDP) is becoming an emerging topic for excellent accuracy and high performance. Meanwhile we argue that NN-driven IDP should satisfy three design goals: the flexibility to support various NNs models, the low-latency-high-throughput inference performance, and the data-plane-unawareness harming no performance and functionality. Unfortunately, existing work either over-modify NNs for IDP, or insert inline pipelined accelerators into the data-plane, failing to meet the flexibility and unawareness goals. In this paper, we propose Kaleidoscope, a flexible and high-performance co-processor located at the bypass of the data-plane. To address the challenge of meeting three design goals, three key techniques are presented. The programmable run-to-completion accelerators are developed for flexible inference. To further improve performance, we design a scalable inference engine which completes low-latency and low-cost inference for the mouse flows, and perform complex NNs with high-accuracy for the elephant flows. Finally, raw-bytes-based NNs are introduced, which help to achieve unawareness. We prototype Kaleidoscope on both FPGA and ASIC library. In evaluation on six NNs models, Kaleidoscope reaches 256-352 ns inference latency and 100 Gbps throughput with negligible influence on the data-plane. The on-board tested NNs perform state-of-the-art accuracy among other NN-driven IDP, exhibiting the the significant impact of flexibility on enhancing traffic analysis accuracy.