arXiv AI

Memory-Enhanced Neural Solvers for Routing Problems

The paper introduces MEMENTO, a memory‑enhanced neural solver that improves routing problem solutions by using online data from repeated attempts to adjust action distributions during inference. It targets NP‑hard routing tasks such as the Traveling Salesman and Capacitated Vehicle Routing problems, outperforming existing tree‑search and policy‑gradient fine‑tuning methods. MEMENTO demonstrates strong scalability and data efficiency, achieving state‑of‑the‑art results on 11 of 12 evaluated tasks and enabling zero‑shot integration with diversity‑based solvers.

arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 5

Beyond Solving: Prescriptive Probing for Neural Routing Solvers

arXiv:2602. 07216v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Neural combinatorial optimization (NCO) trains fast heuristics for routing problems, but planners often need more than a single solve: they ask which stop to drop, which transition to preserve, or which subset of stops to remove if a route is infeasible.

By Reuben Narad, L\'eonard Boussioux, Michael Wagner
arXiv AI
Sep 2

Reinforcement Learning Enhanced LLM Agents for Complex Vehicle Routing Problems

The paper introduces Reinforcement Learning Enhanced LLM Agents (RLEA), a multi‑agent framework that automates the modeling of complex Vehicle Routing Problems (VRPs). RLEA employs a lightweight neural Planner trained with Soft Q‑learning to coordinate LLM‑based agents, and incorporates an evolutionary memory module and retrieval‑augmented generation to leverage experience and external solver knowledge. Experiments on 48 VRP variants show that RLEA outperforms the prior state‑of‑the‑art method, achieving a 16.67% higher success rate and significantly reducing runtime errors.

By Yi Chen, Zikang Yu, Jiahai Wang, Jinbiao Chen, Jianpeng Zhou, Zizhen Zhang
arXiv AI
Jun 3

ASAP: Exploiting the Satisficing Generalization Edge in Neural Combinatorial Optimization

arXiv:2501. 17377v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has emerged as a promising approach for solving Combinatorial Optimization (CO) problems, such as the 3D Bin Packing Problem (3D-BPP), Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP), or Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP), but these neural solvers often exhibit brittleness when facing distribution shifts.

By Han Fang, Paul Weng, Yutong Ban
arXiv AI
Sep 2

ARISE-RL: Agentic Rubric-Grounded Iterative Self-Evolution with Reinforcement Learning

ARISE‑RL is a full‑cycle self‑evolution framework that couples a task/rubric generator with a reasoning solver, enabling open‑ended agents to learn via reinforcement learning without relying on gold answers. The generator creates tool‑grounded rubric criteria and rewards itself for producing valid, intermediate‑difficulty tasks, while the solver improves through fine‑grained rubric satisfaction signals and multi‑step reasoning. The framework also introduces Reward‑Gated Self‑Evolution Distillation to selectively distill memory‑augmented policies, reducing distribution mismatch, and it is evaluated on the new ECR‑Bench rubric suite, achieving state‑of‑the‑art performance across all benchmarks.

By Fanrui Zhang, Ruixue Ding, Qiang Zhang, Xi Chen, Boli Chen, Shihang Wang, Qiuchen Wang, Hongmin Zhan, Jinxin Bian, Li xingchao, Peijin Zheng, Hao cheng, Pengjun Xie, Kaipeng Zhang, Jiawei Liu, Zheng-Jun Zha
arXiv AI
Jul 21

A Deep Reinforcement Learning Algorithm for the Vehicle Routing Problem with Stochastic Demands and Outsourcing

arXiv:2607. 16875v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce the vehicle routing problem with stochastic demands and outsourcing options (VRP-SDO), in which a logistics service provider partitions customer requests into customers outsourced to a common carrier and customers committed to its fixed fleet.

By Mohsen Dastpak, Fausto Errico, Ola Jabali
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 3

MiLoop: Selective Memory Propagation for Neural Combinatorial Optimization

MiLoop is a reinforcement‑learning‑based constructive framework for neural combinatorial optimization that propagates selective memory across rollout steps. By fusing current embeddings with historical memory before attention layers and applying adaptive gated updates afterward, it enables a shallow policy to learn dynamic embeddings without external solution labels or search‑space pruning. Experiments on four combinatorial optimization problems show MiLoop consistently generates high‑quality solutions for instances ranging from 100 to 10 million nodes, demonstrating strong generalization.

By Changliang Zhou, Yuanyao Chen, Rongsheng Chen, Zhiyun Lin, Zhenkun Wang