Towards Generalization-Oriented Models for Vehicle Routing Problems with Mixture-of-Experts

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Miao, Changhao, Zhang, Yuntian, Wu, Tongyu, Deng, Fang, Chen, Chen
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Miao, Changhao
Zhang, Yuntian
Wu, Tongyu
Deng, Fang
Chen, Chen
author_facet Miao, Changhao
Zhang, Yuntian
Wu, Tongyu
Deng, Fang
Chen, Chen
contents In recent years, Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has achieved substantial progress on Vehicle Routing Problems (VRPs). However, existing DRL-based methods are typically trained on instances generated from a uniform distribution, which limits their performance under real-world distribution shifts. In this paper, we aim to develop a generalization-oriented model that partitions the policy network into multiple modules and adaptively recombines modules to form specific policies during inference. Specifically, we propose Residual Refined Experts with Instance-level Gating (R2E-IG) to improve cross-distribution generalization. Our contributions are threefold: (1) We introduce a Residual Refined Expert (R2E) architecture that enhance expert expressiveness via residual refinement; (2) We design an instance-level gating mechanism that learns distribution-aware instance representations and routes inputs to suitable modules; (3) We propose a mixed-distribution training mechanism equipped with Dynamic Weight Adaption (DWA), which dynamically reweights training data from different distributions to emphasize more informative ones. Extensive experiments show that R2E-IG achieves competitive performance against state-of-the-art baselines on both in-distribution and out-of-distribution instances across synthetic and benchmark datasets. Moreover, R2E-IG is generic and can be easily integrated into existing DRL-based methods to further improve performance.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_26776
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Towards Generalization-Oriented Models for Vehicle Routing Problems with Mixture-of-Experts
Miao, Changhao
Zhang, Yuntian
Wu, Tongyu
Deng, Fang
Chen, Chen
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
In recent years, Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has achieved substantial progress on Vehicle Routing Problems (VRPs). However, existing DRL-based methods are typically trained on instances generated from a uniform distribution, which limits their performance under real-world distribution shifts. In this paper, we aim to develop a generalization-oriented model that partitions the policy network into multiple modules and adaptively recombines modules to form specific policies during inference. Specifically, we propose Residual Refined Experts with Instance-level Gating (R2E-IG) to improve cross-distribution generalization. Our contributions are threefold: (1) We introduce a Residual Refined Expert (R2E) architecture that enhance expert expressiveness via residual refinement; (2) We design an instance-level gating mechanism that learns distribution-aware instance representations and routes inputs to suitable modules; (3) We propose a mixed-distribution training mechanism equipped with Dynamic Weight Adaption (DWA), which dynamically reweights training data from different distributions to emphasize more informative ones. Extensive experiments show that R2E-IG achieves competitive performance against state-of-the-art baselines on both in-distribution and out-of-distribution instances across synthetic and benchmark datasets. Moreover, R2E-IG is generic and can be easily integrated into existing DRL-based methods to further improve performance.
title Towards Generalization-Oriented Models for Vehicle Routing Problems with Mixture-of-Experts
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26776