MViewRouter: Internalizing Geometric Equivariance via Multi-view Alternating Attention for Combinatorial Routing
About
Combinatorial routing problems such as the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) and the Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP) are fundamental NP-hard problems with broad real-world applications. While recent deep reinforcement learning methods have shown promising performance, they typically handle geometric symmetries only through data augmentation, resulting in inconsistent decisions and limited generalization. To address this issue, we propose MViewRouter, a multi-view framework that internalizes geometric equivariance as a structural inductive bias to achieve invariant decision-making across routing problem variants. Our approach introduces a Multi-view Alternating Attention (MAA) mechanism that enables parallel processing over the $D_4$ symmetry group, alternating between intra-view relational modeling and inter-view feature alignment. Furthermore, we optimize the policy via Collective Policy Gradient Aggregation (CPGA), leveraging consensus gradients from multiple symmetric views to stabilize training and accelerate convergence. Experiments on TSP and CVRP benchmarks, as well as real-world TSPLIB instances, demonstrate that MViewRouter achieves competitive solution quality and strong zero-shot generalization.
Related benchmarks
| Task | Dataset | Result | Rank | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Traveling Salesman Problem | TSP50 | Optimality Gap0.01 | 77 | |
| Traveling Salesman Problem | TSP-100 | Optimality Drop0.07 | 69 | |
| Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem | CVRP 100 | Optimality Gap (%)0.19 | 36 | |
| Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem | CVRP 50 | Solution Length10.4 | 7 | |
| Traveling Salesperson Problem | TSPLIB 29 instances | Mean Length6.65 | 2 |