RADAR: Learning to Route with Asymmetry-aware DistAnce Representations

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Yi, Hang, Huang, Ziwei, Ma, Yining, Cao, Zhiguang
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Yi, Hang
Huang, Ziwei
Ma, Yining
Cao, Zhiguang
author_facet Yi, Hang
Huang, Ziwei
Ma, Yining
Cao, Zhiguang
contents Recent neural solvers have achieved strong performance on vehicle routing problems (VRPs), yet they mainly assume symmetric Euclidean distances, restricting applicability to real-world scenarios. A core challenge is encoding the relational features in asymmetric distance matrices of VRPs. Early attempts directly encoded these matrices but often failed to produce compact embeddings and generalized poorly at scale. In this paper, we propose RADAR, a scalable neural framework that augments existing neural VRP solvers with the ability to handle asymmetric inputs. RADAR addresses asymmetry from both static and dynamic perspectives. It leverages Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) on the asymmetric distance matrix to initialize compact and generalizable embeddings that inherently encode the static asymmetry in the inbound and outbound costs of each node. To further model dynamic asymmetry in embedding interactions during encoding, it replaces the standard softmax with Sinkhorn normalization that imposes joint row and column distance awareness in attention weights. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world benchmarks across various VRPs show that RADAR outperforms strong baselines on both in-distribution and out-of-distribution instances, demonstrating robust generalization and superior performance in solving asymmetric VRPs.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_03388
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle RADAR: Learning to Route with Asymmetry-aware DistAnce Representations
Yi, Hang
Huang, Ziwei
Ma, Yining
Cao, Zhiguang
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Recent neural solvers have achieved strong performance on vehicle routing problems (VRPs), yet they mainly assume symmetric Euclidean distances, restricting applicability to real-world scenarios. A core challenge is encoding the relational features in asymmetric distance matrices of VRPs. Early attempts directly encoded these matrices but often failed to produce compact embeddings and generalized poorly at scale. In this paper, we propose RADAR, a scalable neural framework that augments existing neural VRP solvers with the ability to handle asymmetric inputs. RADAR addresses asymmetry from both static and dynamic perspectives. It leverages Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) on the asymmetric distance matrix to initialize compact and generalizable embeddings that inherently encode the static asymmetry in the inbound and outbound costs of each node. To further model dynamic asymmetry in embedding interactions during encoding, it replaces the standard softmax with Sinkhorn normalization that imposes joint row and column distance awareness in attention weights. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world benchmarks across various VRPs show that RADAR outperforms strong baselines on both in-distribution and out-of-distribution instances, demonstrating robust generalization and superior performance in solving asymmetric VRPs.
title RADAR: Learning to Route with Asymmetry-aware DistAnce Representations
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.03388