LangNCO: Compiling Natural-Language Constraints into Inference-Time Interventions for Neural Combinatorial Optimization

Abstract

Neural combinatorial optimization (NCO) rapidly produces high-quality solutions for problem structures encountered during training, but operational requirements may change after deployment and be communicated in natural language. We propose LangNCO, a framework that compiles instance-specific requirements into structured inference-time interventions for a frozen NCO solver, without changing the pretrained policy's architecture, learned input representation, or parameters. A pretrained LLM serves as a replaceable semantic front end, translating each requirement into a schema-validated domain-specific language (DSL) rule set. A deterministic Rule Executor applies the rules as nonexpansive hard action masks. Because local masking prevents immediate violations but does not ensure that a complete feasible continuation remains reachable, Critical-Offset Decoding extracts rule-referenced critical nodes and reallocates part of a fixed rollout budget to multi-strength biased rollouts. Using controlled task-specific language to isolate solver adaptation from open-ended language robustness, we evaluate a CVRP policy on road closures, time windows, vehicle assignments, visit-order requirements, all pairwise combinations, and twelve additional constraint types. LangNCO achieves 100% feasibility on the four primary datasets with mean reference gaps of 1.63--3.26%, 97.33--100% feasibility when separately generated rules are composed for pairwise constraints, and 98.67% feasibility across the additional constraints. These results demonstrate modular post-training adaptation of a frozen NCO solver through inspectable language-derived rules, without retraining.