Towards Generalization-Oriented Models for Vehicle Routing Problems with Mixture-of-Experts
On the map: Mixture-of-experts → MoE in reinforcement learning and robotics
Abstract (arXiv)
In recent years, Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has achieved substantial progress on Vehicle Routing Problems (VRPs). However, existing DRL-based methods are typically trained on instances generated from a uniform distribution, which limits their performance under real-world distribution shifts. In this paper, we aim to develop a generalization-oriented model that partitions the policy network into multiple modules and adaptively recombines modules to form specific policies during inference. Specifically, we propose Residual Refined Experts with Instance-level Gating (R2E-IG) to improve cross-distribution generalization. Our contributions are threefold: (1) We introduce a Residual Refined Expert (R2E) architecture that enhance expert expressiveness via residual refinement; (2) We design an instance-level gating mechanism that learns distribution-aware instance representations and routes inputs to suitable modules; (3) We propose a mixed-distribution training mechanism equipped with Dynamic Weight Adaption (DWA), which dynamically reweights training data from different distributions to emphasize more informative ones. Extensive experiments show that R2E-IG achieves competitive performance against state-of-the-art baselines on both in-distribution and out-of-distribution instances across synthetic and benchmark datasets. Moreover, R2E-IG is generic and can be easily integrated into existing DRL-based methods to further improve performance.
Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in MoE in reinforcement learning and robotics, one of 12 directions in Mixture-of-experts. Builds on 43 of its 65 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 26 May 2026.
Builds on
43 of 65 references.
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