English

URS: A Unified Neural Routing Solver for Cross-Problem Zero-Shot Generalization

Machine Learning 2026-05-26 v2

Abstract

Multi-task neural routing solvers have emerged as a promising paradigm for their ability to solve multiple vehicle routing problems (VRPs) using a single model. However, existing neural solvers typically rely on predefined problem constraints or require per-problem fine-tuning, which substantially limits their zero-shot generalization ability to unseen VRP variants. To address this critical bottleneck, we propose URS, a unified neural routing solver that achieves zero-shot generalization across a wide range of unseen VRPs with a single model. We propose a unified data representation (UDR) that replaces problem enumeration with data unification, thereby broadening the problem coverage and reducing reliance on domain expertise. In addition, we introduce a Mixed Bias Module (MBM) during encoding to improve node embeddings, which efficiently captures multiple priors inherent to various problems. On top of the UDR, we develop a problem-conditioned parameter generator to further improve zero-shot generalization. Extensive experiments show that URS consistently produces high-quality solutions for 110 VRP variants (including 99 unseen variants) while demonstrating impressive scalability to large-scale instances with up to 7000 nodes. To the best of our knowledge, URS is the first neural solver to handle over 100 VRP variants with a single model. Our code is available at https://github.com/CIAM-Group/URS.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2509.23413,
  title  = {URS: A Unified Neural Routing Solver for Cross-Problem Zero-Shot Generalization},
  author = {Changliang Zhou and Canhong Yu and Shunyu Yao and Xi Lin and Zhenkun Wang and Yu Zhou and Qingfu Zhang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.23413},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

accepted by ICML 2026

R2 v1 2026-07-01T06:01:13.738Z