Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Version

acceptedVersion

Publication Date

12-2023

Abstract

While performing favourably on the independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) instances, most of the existing neural methods for vehicle routing problems (VRPs) struggle to generalize in the presence of a distribution shift. To tackle this issue, we propose an ensemble-based deep reinforcement learning method for VRPs, which learns a group of diverse sub-policies to cope with various instance distributions. In particular, to prevent convergence of the parameters to the same one, we enforce diversity across sub-policies by leveraging Bootstrap with random initialization. Moreover, we also explicitly pursue inequality between sub-policies by exploiting regularization terms during training to further enhance diversity. Experimental results show that our method is able to outperform the state-of-the-art neural baselines on randomly generated instances of various distributions, and also generalizes favourably on the benchmark instances from TSPLib and CVRPLib, which confirmed the effectiveness of the whole method and the respective designs.

Discipline

Databases and Information Systems

Research Areas

Data Science and Engineering

Publication

Proceedings of the 37th Conference on Neural Information Processing, New Orleans, United States, December 12-14

First Page

1

Last Page

14

Publisher

Neural information processing systems foundation

City or Country

California

Copyright Owner and License

Authors

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