Beam Search: Faster and Monotonic
Abstract
Beam search is a popular satisficing approach to heuristic search problems that allows one to trade increased computation time for lower solution cost by increasing the beam width parameter. We make two contributions to the study of beam search. First, we show how to make beam search monotonic; that is, we provide a new variant that guarantees non-increasing solution cost as the beam width is increased. This makes setting the beam parameter much easier. Second, we show how using distance-to-go estimates can allow beam search to find better solutions more quickly in domains with non-uniform costs. Together, these results improve the practical effectiveness of beam search.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2204.02929,
title = {Beam Search: Faster and Monotonic},
author = {Sofia Lemons and Carlos Linares López and Robert C. Holte and Wheeler Ruml},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2204.02929},
year = {2022}
}
Comments
9 pages, 15 figures, 3 algorithms, published in the International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling ICAPS 2022