Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

4-2026

Abstract

The practical deployment of Neural Combinatorial Optimization (NCO) for Vehicle Routing Problems (VRPs) is hindered by a critical sim-to-real gap. This gap stems not only from training on oversimplified Euclidean data but also from node-based architectures incapable of handling the node-and-edge-based features with correlated asymmetric cost matrices, such as those for real-world distance and duration. We introduce RRNCO, a novel architecture specifically designed to address these complexities. RRNCO's novelty lies in two key innovations. First, its Adaptive Node Embedding (ANE) efficiently fuses spatial coordinates with real-world distance features using a learned contextual gating mechanism. Second, its Neural Adaptive Bias (NAB) is the first mechanism to jointly model asymmetric distance, duration, and directional angles, enabling it to capture complex, realistic routing constraints. Moreover, we introduce a new VRP benchmark grounded in real-world data crucial for bridging this sim-to-real gap, featuring asymmetric distance and duration matrices from 100 diverse cities, enabling the training and validation of NCO solvers on tasks that are more representative of practical settings. Experiments demonstrate that RRNCO achieves state-of-the-art performance on this benchmark, significantly advancing the practical applicability of neural solvers for real-world logistics. Our code, dataset, and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/ai4co/real-routing-nco.

Keywords

Neural Combinatorial Optimization, Vehicle Routing Problem, Graph Learning, Sim-to-real

Discipline

Artificial Intelligence and Robotics | Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering

Research Areas

Intelligent Systems and Optimization

Areas of Excellence

Sustainability

Publication

Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2026), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, April 23-27

First Page

1

Last Page

25

Publisher

ICLR

City or Country

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Additional URL

https://openreview.net/forum?id=sKvo9ZZfpe

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