Curriculum Learning in Genetic Programming Guided Local Search for Large-scale Vehicle Routing Problems

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Liu, Saining, Mei, Yi, Zhang, Mengjie
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Liu, Saining
Mei, Yi
Zhang, Mengjie
author_facet Liu, Saining
Mei, Yi
Zhang, Mengjie
contents Manually designing (meta-)heuristics for the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) is a challenging task that requires significant domain expertise. Recently, data-driven approaches have emerged as a promising solution, automatically learning heuristics that perform well on training instances and generalize to unseen test cases. Such an approach learns (meta-)heuristics that can perform well on the training instances, expecting it to generalize well on the unseen test instances. A recent method, named GPGLS, uses Genetic Programming (GP) to learn the utility function in Guided Local Search (GLS) and solved large scale VRP effectively. However, the selection of appropriate training instances during the learning process remains an open question, with most existing studies including GPGLS relying on random instance selection. To address this, we propose a novel method, CL-GPGLS, which integrates Curriculum Learning (CL) into GPGLS. Our approach leverages a predefined curriculum to introduce training instances progressively, starting with simpler tasks and gradually increasing complexity, enabling the model to better adapt and optimize for large-scale VRP (LSVRP). Extensive experiments verify the effectiveness of CL-GPGLS, demonstrating significant performance improvements over three baseline methods.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_15839
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Curriculum Learning in Genetic Programming Guided Local Search for Large-scale Vehicle Routing Problems
Liu, Saining
Mei, Yi
Zhang, Mengjie
Neural and Evolutionary Computing
Machine Learning
Manually designing (meta-)heuristics for the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) is a challenging task that requires significant domain expertise. Recently, data-driven approaches have emerged as a promising solution, automatically learning heuristics that perform well on training instances and generalize to unseen test cases. Such an approach learns (meta-)heuristics that can perform well on the training instances, expecting it to generalize well on the unseen test instances. A recent method, named GPGLS, uses Genetic Programming (GP) to learn the utility function in Guided Local Search (GLS) and solved large scale VRP effectively. However, the selection of appropriate training instances during the learning process remains an open question, with most existing studies including GPGLS relying on random instance selection. To address this, we propose a novel method, CL-GPGLS, which integrates Curriculum Learning (CL) into GPGLS. Our approach leverages a predefined curriculum to introduce training instances progressively, starting with simpler tasks and gradually increasing complexity, enabling the model to better adapt and optimize for large-scale VRP (LSVRP). Extensive experiments verify the effectiveness of CL-GPGLS, demonstrating significant performance improvements over three baseline methods.
title Curriculum Learning in Genetic Programming Guided Local Search for Large-scale Vehicle Routing Problems
topic Neural and Evolutionary Computing
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.15839