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Main Authors: Chen, Xiangling, Mei, Yi, Zhang, Mengjie
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.07850
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author Chen, Xiangling
Mei, Yi
Zhang, Mengjie
author_facet Chen, Xiangling
Mei, Yi
Zhang, Mengjie
contents Recent advances in neural neighborhood search methods have shown potential in tackling Vehicle Routing Problems (VRPs). However, most existing approaches rely on simplistic state representations and fuse heterogeneous information via naive concatenation, limiting their ability to capture rich structural and semantic context. To address these limitations, we propose GAMA, a neural neighborhood search method with Graph-aware Multi-modal Attention model in VRP. GAMA encodes the problem instance and its evolving solution as distinct modalities using graph neural networks, and models their intra- and inter-modal interactions through stacked self- and cross-attention layers. A gated fusion mechanism further integrates the multi-modal representations into a structured state, enabling the policy to make informed and generalizable operator selection decisions. Extensive experiments conducted across various synthetic and benchmark instances demonstrate that the proposed algorithm GAMA significantly outperforms the recent neural baselines. Further ablation studies confirm that both the multi-modal attention mechanism and the gated fusion design play a key role in achieving the observed performance gains.
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institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
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spellingShingle GAMA: A Neural Neighborhood Search Method with Graph-aware Multi-modal Attention for Vehicle Routing Problem
Chen, Xiangling
Mei, Yi
Zhang, Mengjie
Artificial Intelligence
Recent advances in neural neighborhood search methods have shown potential in tackling Vehicle Routing Problems (VRPs). However, most existing approaches rely on simplistic state representations and fuse heterogeneous information via naive concatenation, limiting their ability to capture rich structural and semantic context. To address these limitations, we propose GAMA, a neural neighborhood search method with Graph-aware Multi-modal Attention model in VRP. GAMA encodes the problem instance and its evolving solution as distinct modalities using graph neural networks, and models their intra- and inter-modal interactions through stacked self- and cross-attention layers. A gated fusion mechanism further integrates the multi-modal representations into a structured state, enabling the policy to make informed and generalizable operator selection decisions. Extensive experiments conducted across various synthetic and benchmark instances demonstrate that the proposed algorithm GAMA significantly outperforms the recent neural baselines. Further ablation studies confirm that both the multi-modal attention mechanism and the gated fusion design play a key role in achieving the observed performance gains.
title GAMA: A Neural Neighborhood Search Method with Graph-aware Multi-modal Attention for Vehicle Routing Problem
topic Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.07850