# A Unified Model for Multi-Task Drone Routing in Post-Disaster Road Assessment

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.21525 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.21525/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 23 of its 61 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Oct 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

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- [Language Modeling with Gated Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.08083/) (2016)
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- [ORLM: A Customizable Framework in Training Large Models for Automated Optimization Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17743/) (2024)
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- [RouteFinder: Towards Foundation Models for Vehicle Routing Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.15007/) (2024)
- [Multi-Task Learning for Routing Problem with Cross-Problem Zero-Shot Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.16891/) (2024)
- [Multi-Vehicle Routing Problems with Soft Time Windows: A Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05513/) (2020)
- [Pre-RMSNorm and Pre-CRMSNorm Transformers: Equivalent and Efficient Pre-LN Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14858/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models as End-to-end Combinatorial Optimization Solvers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.16865/) (2025)
- [HeurAgenix: Leveraging LLMs for Solving Complex Combinatorial Optimization Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.15196/) (2025)
- [A Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach for Solving the Traveling Salesman Problem with Drone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.12545/) (2021)
- [Mission planning for emergency rapid mapping with drones](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05972/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Post-disaster road assessment (PDRA) is essential for emergency response, enabling rapid evaluation of infrastructure conditions and efficient allocation of resources. Although drones provide a flexible and effective tool for PDRA, routing them in large-scale networks remains challenging. Exact and heuristic optimization methods scale poorly and demand domain expertise, while existing deep reinforcement learning (DRL) approaches adopt a single-task paradigm, requiring separate models for each problem variant and lacking adaptability to evolving operational needs. This study proposes a unified model (UM) for drone routing that simultaneously addresses eight PDRA variants. By training a single neural network across multiple problem configurations, UM captures shared structural knowledge while adapting to variant-specific constraints through a modern transformer encoder-decoder architecture. A lightweight adapter mechanism further enables efficient finetuning to unseen attributes without retraining, enhancing deployment flexibility in dynamic disaster scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the UM reduces training time and parameters by a factor of eight compared with training separate models, while consistently outperforming single-task DRL methods by 6-14%, heuristic algorithms by 22-42%, and commercial solvers by 24-82% in terms of solution quality (total collected information value). The model achieves rapid solutions (1-10 seconds) across networks of up to 1,000 nodes, with robustness confirmed through sensitivity analyses. Moreover, finetuning experiments show that unseen attributes can be effectively incorporated with minimal cost while retaining high solution quality. The source code for UM is publicly available at https://github.com/PJ-HTU/UM_PDRA.