Adversarial Generative Flow Network for Solving Vehicle Routing Problems

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Zhang, Ni, Yang, Jingfeng, Cao, Zhiguang, Chi, Xu
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Zhang, Ni
Yang, Jingfeng
Cao, Zhiguang
Chi, Xu
author_facet Zhang, Ni
Yang, Jingfeng
Cao, Zhiguang
Chi, Xu
contents Recent research into solving vehicle routing problems (VRPs) has gained significant traction, particularly through the application of deep (reinforcement) learning for end-to-end solution construction. However, many current construction-based neural solvers predominantly utilize Transformer architectures, which can face scalability challenges and struggle to produce diverse solutions. To address these limitations, we introduce a novel framework beyond Transformer-based approaches, i.e., Adversarial Generative Flow Networks (AGFN). This framework integrates the generative flow network (GFlowNet)-a probabilistic model inherently adept at generating diverse solutions (routes)-with a complementary model for discriminating (or evaluating) the solutions. These models are trained alternately in an adversarial manner to improve the overall solution quality, followed by a proposed hybrid decoding method to construct the solution. We apply the AGFN framework to solve the capacitated vehicle routing problem (CVRP) and travelling salesman problem (TSP), and our experimental results demonstrate that AGFN surpasses the popular construction-based neural solvers, showcasing strong generalization capabilities on synthetic and real-world benchmark instances.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_01931
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Adversarial Generative Flow Network for Solving Vehicle Routing Problems
Zhang, Ni
Yang, Jingfeng
Cao, Zhiguang
Chi, Xu
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Recent research into solving vehicle routing problems (VRPs) has gained significant traction, particularly through the application of deep (reinforcement) learning for end-to-end solution construction. However, many current construction-based neural solvers predominantly utilize Transformer architectures, which can face scalability challenges and struggle to produce diverse solutions. To address these limitations, we introduce a novel framework beyond Transformer-based approaches, i.e., Adversarial Generative Flow Networks (AGFN). This framework integrates the generative flow network (GFlowNet)-a probabilistic model inherently adept at generating diverse solutions (routes)-with a complementary model for discriminating (or evaluating) the solutions. These models are trained alternately in an adversarial manner to improve the overall solution quality, followed by a proposed hybrid decoding method to construct the solution. We apply the AGFN framework to solve the capacitated vehicle routing problem (CVRP) and travelling salesman problem (TSP), and our experimental results demonstrate that AGFN surpasses the popular construction-based neural solvers, showcasing strong generalization capabilities on synthetic and real-world benchmark instances.
title Adversarial Generative Flow Network for Solving Vehicle Routing Problems
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.01931