On Using Admissible Bounds for Learning Forward Search Heuristics
In recent years, there has been growing interest in utilizing modern machine learning techniques to learn heuristic functions for forward search algorithms. Despite this, there has been little theoretical understanding of what they should learn, how to train them, and why we do so. This lack of understanding has resulted in the adoption of diverse training targets (suboptimal vs optimal costs vs admissible heuristics) and loss functions (e.g., square vs absolute errors) in the literature. In this work, we focus on how to effectively utilize the information provided by admissible heuristics in heuristic learning. We argue that learning from poly-time admissible heuristics by minimizing mean square errors (MSE) is not the correct approach, since its result is merely a noisy, inadmissible copy of an efficiently computable heuristic. Instead, we propose to model the learned heuristic as a truncated gaussian, where admissible heuristics are used not as training targets but as lower bounds of this distribution. This results in a different loss function from the MSE commonly employed in the literature, which implicitly models the learned heuristic as a gaussian distribution. We conduct experiments where both MSE and our novel loss function are applied to learning a heuristic from optimal plan costs. Results show that our proposed method converges faster during training and yields better heuristics.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Methods 이 논문이 사용한 방법론
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
AAC: Admissible-by-Architecture Differentiable Landmark Compression for ALT
We introduce \textbf{AAC} (Architecturally Admissible Compressor), a differentiable landmark-selection module for ALT (A*, Landmarks, and Triangle inequality) shortest-path heuristics whose outputs are admissible by cons…
Learning Admissible Heuristics for A*: Theory and Practice
Heuristic functions are central to the performance of search algorithms such as A-star, where admissibility - the property of never overestimating the true shortest-path cost - guarantees solution optimality. Recent deep…
Learning Empirically Admissible Neural Heuristics for Combinatorial Search
Finding optimal solution paths for combinatorial puzzles like the Rubik's Cube, sliding tile puzzles, and Lights Out remains a classical challenge in artificial intelligence. Heuristic search algorithms, such as A* , gua…
Reinforcement LearningDirect Informed Sampling on Riemannian Manifolds via Loewner Order Lower Bounds
Informed sampling techniques accelerate sampling-based motion planners by focusing the search on promising regions of the state space, yet most existing methods rely on Euclidean heuristics that become inadmissible under…
Bridging Multi-Valued Heuristics and Dimensionality Reduction in Multi-Objective Search
Multi-objective shortest-path (MOSP) algorithms traditionally rely on single-valued heuristics (SVHs), which associate each state with a single admissible cost vector. While SVHs provide safe lower bounds, they fail to c…
Dimensionality Reduction