Towards Full Candidate Interaction: A Comprehensive Comparison Network for Better Route Recommendation

Abstract

We argue that the decision-making essence of route recommendation is comparative judgment: users choose a route because it is better than alternatives in specific aspects. The decision-critical information resides in segment-level spatial differences of non-overlapping parts between routes, which is irreversibly lost through item-level feature aggregation. Existing methods, whether attention-based or pairwise ranking approaches, follow an item-first paradigm that can only infer pairwise relations indirectly from individual route representations. To address this, we propose the Comprehensive Comparison Network (CCN), which inverts the information flow by constructing explicit comparison features from non-overlapping segments between route pairs and reasoning directly in the pairwise space. CCN introduces a Comprehensive Comparison Block that enables context-aware pairwise reasoning, where the comparison between two routes is informed by how both compare against all other candidates. We further develop an interpretable Pair Scoring Network that decomposes pairwise preferences into independent physical fields, providing field-level explanations for route selection. CCN has served as the production ranking model in Amap for over two years, achieving 85.70% offline route-trajectory coverage rate and +1.2% online improvement over the previous production model. We also release a large-scale route recommendation dataset comprising 175 million users, 512 million samples, and 6 billion routes across 370 cities.