提升轻量解码器能力,显著增强车辆路径问题的泛化性能
Rethinking Light Decoder-based Solvers for Vehicle Routing Problems

- 通过增加身份映射和前馈层,增强解码器信息处理能力
- 在大规模实例和复杂变体上,显著提升跨分布泛化效果
- 为轻量解码器设计提供新思路,适合追求效率的工业应用
轻量解码器求解器因其高效性与强化学习算法的良好兼容性,被广泛用于求解车辆路径问题(VRPs)。然而,其在更大规模实例或不同VRP变体上的泛化能力有限。本文重新审视轻量解码器方法,分析其依赖静态嵌入带来的问题:编码器需在单一嵌入集中承载所有可能决策场景的信息,导致信息密度过高。实证表明,过于简单的解码器难以有效利用这些高密度信息,尤其在任务复杂度上升时,限制了其在分布外(OOD)设置下的泛化能力。基于此,我们提出仅通过添加身份映射和前馈层即可显著改善解码器容量。实验显示,该方法在大规模实例及复杂VRP变体上显著提升了轻量解码器的OOD泛化性能,缩小了与重型解码器范式的差距。代码已开源:https://github.com/ziweileonhuang/reld-nco。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Light decoder-based solvers have gained popularity for solving vehicle routing problems (VRPs) due to their efficiency and ease of integration with reinforcement learning algorithms. However, they often struggle with generalization to larger problem instances or different VRP variants. This paper revisits light decoder-based approaches, analyzing the implications of their reliance on static embeddings and the inherent challenges that arise. Specifically, we demonstrate that in the light decoder paradigm, the encoder is implicitly tasked with capturing information for all potential decision scenarios during solution construction within a single set of embeddings, resulting in high information density. Furthermore, our empirical analysis reveals that the overly simplistic decoder struggles to effectively utilize this dense information, particularly as task complexity increases, which limits generalization to out-of-distribution (OOD) settings. Building on these insights, we show that enhancing the decoder capacity, with a simple addition of identity mapping and a feed-forward layer, can considerably alleviate the generalization issue. Experimentally, our method significantly enhances the OOD generalization of light decoder-based approaches on large-scale instances and complex VRP variants, narrowing the gap with the heavy decoder paradigm. Our code is available at: https://github.com/ziweileonhuang/reld-nco.
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