arXiv AI

Learning to Reduce Search Space for Generalizable Neural Routing Solver

arXiv:2503. 03137v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Constructive neural combinatorial optimization (NCO) offers a promising paradigm for solving vehicle routing problems (VRPs) by directly learning to construct approximate optimal solutions, thereby reducing reliance on expert knowledge for algorithm design.

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
Aug 25

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.

By Felix Chalumeau, Refiloe Shabe, Noah De Nicola, Arnu Pretorius, Thomas D. Barrett, Nathan Grinsztajn
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 Machine Learning
Sep 4

Learning Constraints-Based Adaptive Hypergraph Neural Networks for Solving Vehicle Routing Problems

The paper presents an end‑to‑end framework that uses constraint‑oriented hypergraphs and reinforcement learning to solve vehicle routing problems. It introduces a dynamic hyperedge reconstruction strategy for better hypergraph representation and a double‑pointer attention decoder for iterative solution generation. Experiments on benchmark datasets show that the method removes the need for complex heuristic operators while improving solution quality.

By Zhenwei Wang, Tiehua Zhang, Jing Liu, Heng Yu, Kaizhu Huang, Ruibin Bai
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 11

OD-Gear: Online Decomposition and Group Sampling for Expert-Guided Adversarial Routing in Scalable Capacitated Vehicle Routing

arXiv:2602. 00488v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Solving large-scale capacitated vehicle routing problems (CVRP) is hindered by the high complexity of classical heuristics and the limited generalization of neural solvers.

By Dongbin Jiao, Zisheng Chen, Xianyi Wang, Jintao Shi, Shengcai Liu, Shi Yan