Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Version

acceptedVersion

Publication Date

7-2025

Abstract

Recent advances toward foundation models for routing problems have shown great potential of a unified deep model for various VRP variants. However, they overlook the complex real-world customer distributions. In this work, we advance the Multi-Task VRP (MTVRP) setting to the more realistic yet challenging Multi-Task Multi-Distribution VRP (MTMDVRP) setting, and introduce SHIELD, a novel model that leverages both sparsity and hierarchy principles. Building on a deeper decoder architecture, we first incorporate the Mixture-of-Depths (MoD) technique to enforce sparsity. This improves both efficiency and generalization by allowing the model to dynamically select nodes to use or skip each decoder layer, providing the needed capacity to adaptively allocate computation for learning the task/distribution specific and shared representations. We also develop a context-based clustering layer that exploits the presence of hierarchical structures in the problems to produce better local representations. These two designs inductively bias the network to identify key features that are common across tasks and distributions, leading to significantly improved generalization on unseen ones. Our empirical results demonstrate the superiority of our approach over existing methods on 9 real-world maps with 16 VRP variants each.

Discipline

Artificial Intelligence and Robotics

Research Areas

Intelligent Systems and Optimization

Areas of Excellence

Sustainability

Publication

Proceedings of the 42nd International Conference on Machine Learning, Vancouver, Canada, 2025 July 13

First Page

1

Last Page

33

Identifier

10.48550/arXiv.2506.08424

City or Country

Vancouver, Canada

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2506.08424

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