arXiv:2607. 04487v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural autoregressive solvers for the Multi-Attribute Vehicle Routing Problem (MAVRP) reach competitive cost but offer no per-step justification, a problem when dispatchers must validate, accept, or compare them.
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.
arXiv:2608.24859v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-task vehicle routing problem (VRP) solvers seek to handle multiple VRP variants within a single unified model, avoiding the need to train a separ...
The paper investigates whether different forms of intermediate computation in large language models—such as token-based traces, pause tokens, and latent reasoning—rely on the same underlying mechanism. By training five variants of GPTNeoX on an extended multi-hop reasoning task, the authors find that while vanilla, Chain-of-Thought, and Pause Token models perform well on in-distribution data, they fail to generalize to longer-hop out-of-distribution problems. In contrast, latent-reasoning models exhibit better depth generalization, with causal analysis revealing a sparse recurrent search circuit that implements forward reachability propagation across the graph.
arXiv:2604. 13517v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Temporal credit assignment in reinforcement learning is often approached by introducing value estimates at multiple discount factors.
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:2509.05084v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The primary paradigm in Neural Combinatorial Optimization (NCO) consists of construction methods, where a neural network is trained to sequentially...
The paper investigates Hierarchical Reasoning Models (HRM), a class of hierarchical Transformer-based latent reasoning models, across Sudoku, Maze, and ARC-AGI-2 tasks. By comparing HRM to Transformer baselines, applying causal interventions on recurrent states, and conducting linear probe and sparse autoencoder ablations, the authors find that recurrent models outperform one-pass baselines, that high- and low-level states contribute differently across tasks, and that ablations of sparse autoencoder features cause larger behavioral changes than probe-direction ablations. The study concludes that HRM implements constraint‑aware iterative refinement on a puzzle‑specific solution state, with component contributions varying without a compact, causally important feature set.
arXiv:2606. 25127v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate how reward design shapes the internal attention patterns of reinforcement learning agents trained for autonomous driving.
Language-model agents increasingly face long-horizon tasks with evolving state, interdependent decisions, and delayed outcomes. Scaling their training requires diverse agentic environments, dependable...
The paper introduces VHD-Play, a pipeline that first samples and solves a mathematical model before generating agentic reinforcement learning environments, ensuring that dynamics and evaluation are aligned from the outset. This approach yields 3,300 diverse environments at a low cost and significantly improves the performance of a large language‑model agent (Qwen3.6‑35B‑A3B) across multiple diagnostic families and external benchmarks. The study demonstrates that stateful interaction is a key factor in learning gains and that scaling the training substrate can further enhance performance.
Neural asymmetric routing models increasingly encode directionality through matrix representations and asymmetry-aware attention. The final routing action, however, is not a node in isolation but a directed transition chosen under the current partial route.