We present an end-to-end framework for solving the V ehicle Routing Problem (VRP) using reinforcement learning.

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R is the prize of visited node. Most of MDP is similar with TSP including training scheme. The MDP formulation is mostly same as TSP . This section provides implementation details of the seeder for the experiments. The details of setting T in the inference phase (i.e. in experiments) is described in Appendix A.5. A.3 Detailed Implementation of Reviser This section describes the detailed implementation of the reviser for each target problem.

Finding a feasible and prompt solution to the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) is a prerequisite for efficient freight transportation, seamless logistics, and sustainable mobility. Traditional optimization methods reach their limits when confronted with the real-world complexity of VRPs, which involve numerous constraints and objectives. Recently, the ability of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) to solve combinatorial tasks, known as Neural Combinatorial Optimization (NCO), demonstrated promising results, offering new perspectives. In this study, we propose an NCO approach to solve a time-constrained capacitated VRP with a finite vehicle fleet size. The approach is based on an encoder-decoder architecture, formulated in line with the Policy Optimization with Multiple Optima (POMO) protocol and trained via a Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) algorithm. We successfully trained the policy with multiple objectives (minimizing the total distance while maximizing vehicle utilization) and evaluated it on medium and large instances, benchmarking it against state-of-the-art heuristics. The method is able to find adequate and cost-efficient solutions, showing both flexibility and robust generalization. Finally, we provide a critical analysis of the solution generated by NCO and discuss the challenges and opportunities of this new branch of intelligent learning algorithms emerging in optimization science, focusing on freight transportation.

In task-oriented dialogue systems, intent detection is crucial for interpreting user queries and providing appropriate responses. Existing research primarily addresses simple queries with a single intent, lacking effective systems for handling complex queries with multiple intents and extracting different intent spans. Additionally, there is a notable absence of multilingual, multi-intent datasets. This study addresses three critical tasks: extracting multiple intent spans from queries, detecting multiple intents, and developing a multi-lingual multi-label intent dataset. We introduce a novel multi-label multi-class intent detection dataset (MLMCID-dataset) curated from existing benchmark datasets. We also propose a pointer network-based architecture (MLMCID) to extract intent spans and detect multiple intents with coarse and fine-grained labels in the form of sextuplets. Comprehensive analysis demonstrates the superiority of our pointer network-based system over baseline approaches in terms of accuracy and F1-score across various datasets.

We introduce a new neural architecture to learn the conditional probability of an output sequence with elements that arediscrete tokens corresponding to positions in an input sequence.Such problems cannot be trivially addressed by existent approaches such as sequence-to-sequence and Neural Turing Machines,because the number of target classes in eachstep of the output depends on the length of the input, which is variable.Problems such as sorting variable sized sequences, and various combinatorialoptimization problems belong to this class. It differs from the previous attentionattempts in that, instead of using attention to blend hidden units of anencoder to a context vector at each decoder step, it uses attention asa pointer to select a member of the input sequence as the output. We call this architecture a Pointer Net (Ptr-Net).We show Ptr-Nets can be used to learn approximate solutions to threechallenging geometric problems -- finding planar convex hulls, computingDelaunay triangulations, and the planar Travelling Salesman Problem-- using training examples alone. Ptr-Nets not only improve oversequence-to-sequence with input attention, butalso allow us to generalize to variable size output dictionaries.We show that the learnt models generalize beyond the maximum lengthsthey were trained on. We hope our results on these taskswill encourage a broader exploration of neural learning for discreteproblems.

Nature has evolved humans to walk on different terrains by developing a detailed understanding of their physical characteristics. Similarly, legged robots need to develop their capability to walk on complex terrains with a variety of task-dependent payloads to achieve their goals. However, conventional terrain adaptation methods are susceptible to failure with varying payloads. In this work, we introduce PANOS, a weakly supervised approach that integrates proprioception and exteroception from onboard sensing to achieve a stable gait while walking by a legged robot over various terrains. Our work also provides evidence of its adaptability over varying payloads. We evaluate our method on multiple terrains and payloads using a legged robot. PANOS improves the stability up to 44% without any payload and 53% with 15 lbs payload. We also notice a reduction in the vibration cost of 20% with the payload for various terrain types when compared to state-of-the-art methods.

Biomedical text summarization is a critical tool that enables clinicians to effectively ascertain patient status. Traditionally, text summarization has been accomplished with transformer models, which are capable of compressing long documents into brief summaries. However, transformer models are known to be among the most challenging natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Specifically, GPT models have a tendency to generate factual errors, lack context, and oversimplify words. To address these limitations, we replaced the attention mechanism in the GPT model with a pointer network. This modification was designed to preserve the core values of the original text during the summarization process. The effectiveness of the Pointer-GPT model was evaluated using the ROUGE score. The results demonstrated that Pointer-GPT outperformed the original GPT model. These findings suggest that pointer networks can be a valuable addition to EMR systems and can provide clinicians with more accurate and informative summaries of patient medical records. This research has the potential to usher in a new paradigm in EMR systems and to revolutionize the way that clinicians interact with patient medical records.

The Bin Packing Problem (BPP) has attracted enthusiastic research interest recently, owing to widespread applications in logistics and warehousing environments. It is truly essential to optimize the bin packing to enable more objects to be packed into boxes. Object packing order and placement strategy are the two crucial optimization objectives of the BPP. However, existing optimization methods for BPP, such as the genetic algorithm (GA), emerge as the main issues in highly computational cost and relatively low accuracy, making it difficult to implement in realistic scenarios. To well relieve the research gaps, we present a novel optimization methodology of two-dimensional (2D)-BPP and three-dimensional (3D)-BPP for objects with regular shapes via deep reinforcement learning (DRL), maximizing the space utilization and minimizing the usage number of boxes. First, an end-to-end DRL neural network constructed by a modified Pointer Network consisting of an encoder, a decoder and an attention module is proposed to achieve the optimal object packing order. Second, conforming to the top-down operation mode, the placement strategy based on a height map is used to arrange the ordered objects in the boxes, preventing the objects from colliding with boxes and other objects in boxes. Third, the reward and loss functions are defined as the indicators of the compactness, pyramid, and usage number of boxes to conduct the training of the DRL neural network based on an on-policy actor-critic framework. Finally, a series of experiments are implemented to compare our method with conventional packing methods, from which we conclude that our method outperforms these packing methods in both packing accuracy and efficiency.