  Binary optimization has a wide range of applications in combinatorial
optimization problems such as MaxCut, MIMO detection, and MaxSAT. However,
these problems are typically NP-hard due to the binary constraints. We develop
a novel probabilistic model to sample the binary solution according to a
parameterized policy distribution. Specifically, minimizing the KL divergence
between the parameterized policy distribution and the Gibbs distributions of
the function value leads to a stochastic optimization problem whose policy
gradient can be derived explicitly similar to reinforcement learning. For
coherent exploration in discrete spaces, parallel Markov Chain Monte Carlo
(MCMC) methods are employed to sample from the policy distribution with
diversity and approximate the gradient efficiently. We further develop a filter
scheme to replace the original objective function by the one with the local
search technique to broaden the horizon of the function landscape. Convergence
to stationary points in expectation of the policy gradient method is
established based on the concentration inequality for MCMC. Numerical results
show that this framework is very promising to provide near-optimal solutions
for quite a few binary optimization problems.

Optimization and Control;Artificial Intelligence;Machine Learning