Title: URS: A Unified Neural Routing Solver for Cross-Problem Zero-Shot Generalization
Primary area: optimization
Keywords: Vehicle Routing Problem, Reinforcement Learning, Neural Combinatorial Optimization, Zero-Shot Generalization, Unified Routing Solver

Abstract: Multi-task neural routing solvers have emerged as a promising paradigm for their ability to solve multiple vehicle routing problems (VRPs) using a single model. However, existing neural solvers typically rely on predefined problem constraints or require per-problem fine-tuning, which substantially limits their zero-shot generalization ability to unseen VRP variants. To address this critical bottleneck, we propose URS, a unified neural routing solver capable of zero-shot generalization across a wide range of unseen VRPs using a single model without any fine-tuning. The key component of URS is the unified data representation (UDR), which replaces problem enumeration with data unification, thereby broadening the problem coverage and reducing reliance on domain expertise. In addition, we propose a Mixed Bias Module (MBM) to efficiently learn the geometric and relational biases inherent in various problems. On top of the proposed UDR, we further develop a parameter generator that adaptively adjusts the decoder and bias weights of MBM to enhance zero-shot generalization. Moreover, we propose an LLM-driven constraint satisfaction mechanism, which translates raw problem descriptions into executable stepwise masking functions to ensure solution feasibility. Extensive experiments demonstrate that URS can consistently produce high-quality solutions for more than 100 distinct VRP variants without any fine-tuning, which includes more than 90 unseen variants. To the best of our knowledge, URS is the first neural solver capable of handling over 100 VRP variants with a single model.

TL;DR: We propose a unified neural routing solver capable of consistently producing high-quality solutions for more than 100 distinct VRP variants without any fine-tuning.