Distilling Autoregressive Models to Obtain High-Performance Non-Autoregressive Solvers for Vehicle Routing Problems with Faster Inference Speed

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Xiao, Yubin, Wang, Di, Li, Boyang, Wang, Mingzhao, Wu, Xuan, Zhou, Changliang, Zhou, You
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2023
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author Xiao, Yubin
Wang, Di
Li, Boyang
Wang, Mingzhao
Wu, Xuan
Zhou, Changliang
Zhou, You
author_facet Xiao, Yubin
Wang, Di
Li, Boyang
Wang, Mingzhao
Wu, Xuan
Zhou, Changliang
Zhou, You
contents Neural construction models have shown promising performance for Vehicle Routing Problems (VRPs) by adopting either the Autoregressive (AR) or Non-Autoregressive (NAR) learning approach. While AR models produce high-quality solutions, they generally have a high inference latency due to their sequential generation nature. Conversely, NAR models generate solutions in parallel with a low inference latency but generally exhibit inferior performance. In this paper, we propose a generic Guided Non-Autoregressive Knowledge Distillation (GNARKD) method to obtain high-performance NAR models having a low inference latency. GNARKD removes the constraint of sequential generation in AR models while preserving the learned pivotal components in the network architecture to obtain the corresponding NAR models through knowledge distillation. We evaluate GNARKD by applying it to three widely adopted AR models to obtain NAR VRP solvers for both synthesized and real-world instances. The experimental results demonstrate that GNARKD significantly reduces the inference time (4-5 times faster) with acceptable performance drop (2-3\%). To the best of our knowledge, this study is first-of-its-kind to obtain NAR VRP solvers from AR ones through knowledge distillation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2312_12469
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Distilling Autoregressive Models to Obtain High-Performance Non-Autoregressive Solvers for Vehicle Routing Problems with Faster Inference Speed
Xiao, Yubin
Wang, Di
Li, Boyang
Wang, Mingzhao
Wu, Xuan
Zhou, Changliang
Zhou, You
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Neural construction models have shown promising performance for Vehicle Routing Problems (VRPs) by adopting either the Autoregressive (AR) or Non-Autoregressive (NAR) learning approach. While AR models produce high-quality solutions, they generally have a high inference latency due to their sequential generation nature. Conversely, NAR models generate solutions in parallel with a low inference latency but generally exhibit inferior performance. In this paper, we propose a generic Guided Non-Autoregressive Knowledge Distillation (GNARKD) method to obtain high-performance NAR models having a low inference latency. GNARKD removes the constraint of sequential generation in AR models while preserving the learned pivotal components in the network architecture to obtain the corresponding NAR models through knowledge distillation. We evaluate GNARKD by applying it to three widely adopted AR models to obtain NAR VRP solvers for both synthesized and real-world instances. The experimental results demonstrate that GNARKD significantly reduces the inference time (4-5 times faster) with acceptable performance drop (2-3\%). To the best of our knowledge, this study is first-of-its-kind to obtain NAR VRP solvers from AR ones through knowledge distillation.
title Distilling Autoregressive Models to Obtain High-Performance Non-Autoregressive Solvers for Vehicle Routing Problems with Faster Inference Speed
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.12469