@inproceedings{
zhou2024collaboration,
title={Collaboration! Towards Robust Neural Methods for Routing Problems},
author={Jianan Zhou and Yaoxin Wu and Zhiguang Cao and Wen Song and Jie Zhang and Zhiqi Shen},
booktitle={The Thirty-eighth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems},
year={2024},
url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=YfQA78gEFA}
}
Despite enjoying desirable efficiency and reduced reliance on domain expertise, existing neural methods for vehicle routing problems (VRPs) suffer from severe robustness issues — their performance significantly deteriorates on clean instances with crafted perturbations. To enhance robustness, we propose an ensemble-based *Collaborative Neural Framework (CNF)* w.r.t. the defense of neural VRP methods, which is crucial yet underexplored in the literature. Given a neural VRP method, we adversarially train multiple models in a collaborative manner to synergistically promote robustness against attacks, while boosting standard generalization on clean instances. A neural router is designed to adeptly distribute training instances among models, enhancing overall load balancing and collaborative efficacy. Extensive experiments verify the effectiveness and versatility of CNF in defending against various attacks across different neural VRP methods. Notably, our approach also achieves impressive out-of-distribution generalization on benchmark instances.
Collaboration! Towards Robust Neural Methods for Routing Problems
Jianan Zhou Yaoxin Wu Zhiguang Cao Wen Song Jie Zhang Zhiqi Shen