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Recent deep models for solving routing problems always assume a single distribution of nodes for training, which severely impairs their cross-distribution generalization ability. In this paper, we exploit group distributionally robust…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-16 Yuan Jiang , Yaoxin Wu , Zhiguang Cao , Jie Zhang

Neural Combinatorial Optimisation (NCO) is a promising learning-based approach for solving Vehicle Routing Problems (VRPs) without extensive manual design. While existing constructive NCO methods typically follow an appending-based paradigm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-31 Fu Luo , Xi Lin , Mengyuan Zhong , Fei Liu , Zhenkun Wang , Jianyong Sun , Qingfu Zhang

Neural Combinatorial Optimization aims to learn to solve a class of combinatorial problems through data-driven methods and notably through employing neural networks by learning the underlying distribution of problem instances. While, so far…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Daniela Thyssens , Tim Dernedde , Wilson Sentanoe , Lars Schmidt-Thieme

A key challenge in solving a combinatorial optimization problem is how to guide the agent (i.e., solver) to efficiently explore the enormous search space. Conventional approaches often rely on enumeration (e.g., exhaustive, random, or tabu…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-08-11 Xingwen Zhang , Shuang Yang

Deep neural networks based on reinforcement learning (RL) for solving combinatorial optimization (CO) problems are developing rapidly and have shown a tendency to approach or even outperform traditional solvers. However, existing methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-24 Chaoyang Wang , Pengzhi Cheng , Jingze Li , Weiwei Sun

The Fleet Size and Mix Vehicle Routing Problem (FSMVRP) is a prominent variant of the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP), extensively studied in operations research and computational science. FSMVRP requires simultaneous decisions on fleet…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-01 Pengfu Wan , Jiawei Chen , Gangyan Xu

The vehicle routing problem with two-dimensional loading constraints (2L-CVRP) and the last-in-first-out (LIFO) rule presents significant practical and algorithmic challenges. While numerous heuristic approaches have been proposed to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-06-19 Yifan Xia , Xiangyi Zhang

The recently presented idea to learn heuristics for combinatorial optimization problems is promising as it can save costly development. However, to push this idea towards practical implementation, we need better models and better ways of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-02-08 Wouter Kool , Herke van Hoof , Max Welling

Current methods for end-to-end constructive neural combinatorial optimization usually train a policy using behavior cloning from expert solutions or policy gradient methods from reinforcement learning. While behavior cloning is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Jonathan Pirnay , Dominik G. Grimm

Value-function-based methods have long played an important role in reinforcement learning. However, finding the best next action given a value function of arbitrary complexity is nontrivial when the action space is too large for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-26 Arthur Delarue , Ross Anderson , Christian Tjandraatmadja

Despite the extensive research efforts and the remarkable results obtained on Vehicle Routing Problems (VRP) by using algorithms proposed by the Machine Learning community that are partially or entirely based on data-driven analysis, most…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-30 Luca Accorsi , Andrea Lodi , Daniele Vigo

Vehicle routing problems (VRPs) are central to combinatorial optimization with significant practical implications. Recent advancements in neural combinatorial optimization (NCO) have demonstrated promising results by leveraging neural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Han Li , Fei Liu , Zhenkun Wang , Qingfu Zhang

Reinforcement Learning (RL) provides a powerful framework for decision-making in complex environments. However, implementing RL in hardware-efficient and bio-inspired ways remains a challenge. This paper presents a novel Spiking Neural…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2023-08-09 Sergio F. Chevtchenko , Yeshwanth Bethi , Teresa B. Ludermir , Saeed Afshar

Motivated by the promising advances of deep-reinforcement learning (DRL) applied to cooperative multi-agent systems we propose a model and learning procedure to solve the Capacitated Multi-Vehicle Routing Problem (CMVRP) with fixed fleet…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2019-12-10 Jose Manuel Vera , Andres G. Abad

This paper introduces RouteFinder, a comprehensive foundation model framework to tackle different Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) variants. Our core idea is that a foundation model for VRPs should be able to represent variants by treating…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-16 Federico Berto , Chuanbo Hua , Nayeli Gast Zepeda , André Hottung , Niels Wouda , Leon Lan , Junyoung Park , Kevin Tierney , Jinkyoo Park

Autonomous robots are widely utilized for mapping and exploration tasks due to their cost-effectiveness. Multi-robot systems offer scalability and efficiency, especially in terms of the number of robots deployed in more complex…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Apoorva Vashisth , Manav Kulshrestha , Damon Conover , Aniket Bera

The min-max vehicle routing problem (min-max VRP) traverses all given customers by assigning several routes and aims to minimize the length of the longest route. Recently, reinforcement learning (RL)-based sequential planning methods have…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-07 Zhi Zheng , Shunyu Yao , Zhenkun Wang , Xialiang Tong , Mingxuan Yuan , Ke Tang

Existing deep reinforcement learning (DRL) based methods for solving the capacitated vehicle routing problem (CVRP) intrinsically cope with homogeneous vehicle fleet, in which the fleet is assumed as repetitions of a single vehicle. Hence,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-08 Jingwen Li , Yining Ma , Ruize Gao , Zhiguang Cao , Andrew Lim , Wen Song , Jie Zhang

Vehicle Routing Problems (VRPs) can model many real-world scenarios and often involve complex constraints. While recent neural methods excel in constructing solutions based on feasibility masking, they struggle with handling complex…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-10-29 Jieyi Bi , Yining Ma , Jianan Zhou , Wen Song , Zhiguang Cao , Yaoxin Wu , Jie Zhang

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has recently shown significant promise across various NLP and computer vision tasks by explicitly generating intermediate reasoning steps. However, we find that reinforcement learning (RL)-based fine-tuned…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-11-19 Qingyang Yan , Guangyao Chen , Yixiong Zou