URS: A Unified Neural Routing Solver for Cross-Problem Zero-Shot Generalization
About
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 that achieves zero-shot generalization across a wide range of unseen VRPs with a single model. We propose a unified data representation (UDR) that replaces problem enumeration with data unification, thereby broadening the problem coverage and reducing reliance on domain expertise. In addition, we introduce a Mixed Bias Module (MBM) during encoding to improve node embeddings, which efficiently captures multiple priors inherent to various problems. On top of the UDR, we develop a problem-conditioned parameter generator to further improve zero-shot generalization. Extensive experiments show that URS consistently produces high-quality solutions for 110 VRP variants (including 99 unseen variants) while demonstrating impressive scalability to large-scale instances with up to 7000 nodes. To the best of our knowledge, URS is the first neural solver to handle over 100 VRP variants with a single model. Our code is available at https://github.com/CIAM-Group/URS.
Related benchmarks
| Task | Dataset | Result | Rank | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Traveling Salesman Problem | TSP100 | Optimality Gap (%)0.08 | 37 | |
| Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem | CVRP 100 | Optimality Gap (%)1.63 | 36 | |
| Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows | CVRPTW100 1,000 instances | Optimality Gap3.22 | 18 | |
| Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem | CVRPLIB Set-XXL (test) | Gap (Leuven1, N=3000)11.57 | 15 | |
| Vehicle Routing Problem solving | CVRPLib Set-AGS Set-XXL | Gap (%) Leuven1 (N=3000)11.5 | 12 | |
| Vehicle Routing Problem | CVRPB n=100 | Time (minutes)7 | 11 | |
| Vehicle Routing Problem | MDOCVRPBP 1K instances N=100 (test) | Optimality Gap24.22 | 10 | |
| Vehicle Routing Problem | CVRPBPLTW | Symmetric Gap9.18 | 10 | |
| Vehicle Routing Problem | CVRPLIB Set-X and Set-XXL (ALL) | Solved Instances Count34 | 9 | |
| Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem | CVRPLIB Set-X 32 (N ∈ [500, 1000]) | Optimality Gap8.678 | 9 |