Reasoning in a Combinatorial and Constrained World: Benchmarking LLMs on Natural-Language Combinatorial Optimization (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | NLCO evaluates large language models for combinatorial optimization (CO) . existing evaluations emphasize relatively simple reasoning competencies . |
| Approach: | They propose a combinatorial optimization benchmark that evaluates large language models on CO reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can handle combinatorial optimization without writing code or calling external solvers. |
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