MPFlow: Learning Budgeted Max-Flow Optimization on the Lightning Network with Deep Graph Reinforcement Learning
We address liquidity placement in the Bitcoin Lightning Network (LN): given a fixed budget, which channels should a node open to maximize its routing capacity? We cast this as a budget-constrained combinatorial optimization problem on graphs, selecting $k$ edge additions that maximize $s$--$t$ max-flow, a theory-grounded measure of routing capacity, and solve it with graph reinforcement learning. Our lightweight agent combines a message-passing policy network with proximal policy optimization (PPO) and action masking, and is trained under a hub-exclusion curriculum: the network's top hubs are removed from training subgraphs, forcing the policy to learn capacity-aware placement rather than...
| Authors | Harrison Rush, Vincent Davis, Simone Antonelli et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 9 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 9 July 2026 |
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