Collaboration! Towards Robust Neural Methods for Routing Problems

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zhou, Jianan, Wu, Yaoxin, Cao, Zhiguang, Song, Wen, Zhang, Jie, Shen, Zhiqi
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Zhou, Jianan
Wu, Yaoxin
Cao, Zhiguang
Song, Wen
Zhang, Jie
Shen, Zhiqi
author_facet Zhou, Jianan
Wu, Yaoxin
Cao, Zhiguang
Song, Wen
Zhang, Jie
Shen, Zhiqi
contents Despite enjoying desirable efficiency and reduced reliance on domain expertise, existing neural methods for vehicle routing problems (VRPs) suffer from severe robustness issues -- their performance significantly deteriorates on clean instances with crafted perturbations. To enhance robustness, we propose an ensemble-based Collaborative Neural Framework (CNF) w.r.t. the defense of neural VRP methods, which is crucial yet underexplored in the literature. Given a neural VRP method, we adversarially train multiple models in a collaborative manner to synergistically promote robustness against attacks, while boosting standard generalization on clean instances. A neural router is designed to adeptly distribute training instances among models, enhancing overall load balancing and collaborative efficacy. Extensive experiments verify the effectiveness and versatility of CNF in defending against various attacks across different neural VRP methods. Notably, our approach also achieves impressive out-of-distribution generalization on benchmark instances.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_04968
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Collaboration! Towards Robust Neural Methods for Routing Problems
Zhou, Jianan
Wu, Yaoxin
Cao, Zhiguang
Song, Wen
Zhang, Jie
Shen, Zhiqi
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Despite enjoying desirable efficiency and reduced reliance on domain expertise, existing neural methods for vehicle routing problems (VRPs) suffer from severe robustness issues -- their performance significantly deteriorates on clean instances with crafted perturbations. To enhance robustness, we propose an ensemble-based Collaborative Neural Framework (CNF) w.r.t. the defense of neural VRP methods, which is crucial yet underexplored in the literature. Given a neural VRP method, we adversarially train multiple models in a collaborative manner to synergistically promote robustness against attacks, while boosting standard generalization on clean instances. A neural router is designed to adeptly distribute training instances among models, enhancing overall load balancing and collaborative efficacy. Extensive experiments verify the effectiveness and versatility of CNF in defending against various attacks across different neural VRP methods. Notably, our approach also achieves impressive out-of-distribution generalization on benchmark instances.
title Collaboration! Towards Robust Neural Methods for Routing Problems
topic Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.04968