Related papers: Non-Blocking Batch A* (Technical Report)
Path planning in robotics often requires finding high-quality solutions to continuously valued and/or high-dimensional problems. These problems are challenging and most planning algorithms instead solve simplified approximations. Popular…
We propose a novel technique for algorithm-selection, applicable to optimisation domains in which there is implicit sequential information encapsulated in the data, e.g., in online bin-packing. Specifically we train two types of recurrent…
One of the basic tasks for Bayesian networks (BNs) is that of learning a network structure from data. The BN-learning problem is NP-hard, so the standard solution is heuristic search. Many approaches have been proposed for this task, but…
Most iterative neural network training methods use estimates of the loss function over small random subsets (or minibatches) of the data to update the parameters, which aid in decoupling the training time from the (often very large) size of…
Many academic disciplines - including information systems, computer science, and operations management - face scheduling problems as important decision making tasks. Since many scheduling problems are NP-hard in the strong sense, there is a…
Deep neural networks are commonly trained using stochastic non-convex optimization procedures, which are driven by gradient information estimated on fractions (batches) of the dataset. While it is commonly accepted that batch size is an…
Effective solving of constraint problems often requires choosing good or specific search heuristics. However, choosing or designing a good search heuristic is non-trivial and is often a manual process. In this paper, rather than manually…
State-space search with explicit abstraction heuristics is at the state of the art of cost-optimal planning. These heuristics are inherently limited, nonetheless, because the size of the abstract space must be bounded by some, even if a…
In Nature Machine Intelligence 4, 367 (2022), Schuetz et al provide a scheme to employ graph neural networks (GNN) as a heuristic to solve a variety of classical, NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems. It describes how the network is…
In this paper, we present Batch Informed Trees (BIT*), a planning algorithm based on unifying graph- and sampling-based planning techniques. By recognizing that a set of samples describes an implicit random geometric graph (RGG), we are…
The performance of search algorithms for grid-based pathfinding, e.g. A*, critically depends on the heuristic function that is used to focus the search. Recent studies have shown that informed heuristics that take the positions/shapes of…
Complex information needs in real-world search scenarios demand deep reasoning and knowledge synthesis across diverse sources, which traditional retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines struggle to address effectively. Current…
Personalized Route Recommendation (PRR) aims to generate user-specific route suggestions in response to users' route queries. Early studies cast the PRR task as a pathfinding problem on graphs, and adopt adapted search algorithms by…
The design of neural network architectures is frequently either based on human expertise using trial/error and empirical feedback or tackled via large scale reinforcement learning strategies performed over distinct discrete architecture…
The hm admissible heuristics for (sequential and temporal) regression planning are defined by a parameterized relaxation of the optimal cost function in the regression search space, where the parameter m offers a trade-off between the…
We demonstrate that a single training trajectory can transform a graph neural network into an unsupervised heuristic for combinatorial optimization. Focusing on the Travelling Salesman Problem, we show that encoding global structural…
Ensembles over neural network weights trained from different random initialization, known as deep ensembles, achieve state-of-the-art accuracy and calibration. The recently introduced batch ensembles provide a drop-in replacement that is…
Optimization of heuristic functions for the A* algorithm, realized by deep neural networks, is usually done by minimizing square root loss of estimate of the cost to goal values. This paper argues that this does not necessarily lead to a…
A* is a classic and popular method for graphs search and path finding. It assumes the existence of a heuristic function $h(u,t)$ that estimates the shortest distance from any input node $u$ to the destination $t$. Traditionally, heuristics…
Neuromorphic computing (NC) introduces a novel algorithmic paradigm representing a major shift from traditional digital computing of Von Neumann architectures. NC emulates or simulates the neural dynamics of brains in the form of Spiking…