Related papers: The (Un)Scalability of Heuristic Approximators for…

We study exact, efficient and practical algorithms for route planning in large road networks. Routing applications often require integrating the current traffic situation, planning ahead with traffic predictions for the future, respecting…

Finding the shortest path between two points in a graph is a fundamental problem that has been well-studied over the past several decades. Shortest path algorithms are commonly applied to modern navigation systems, so our study aims to…

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…

Hierarchical clustering is a critical task in numerous domains. Many approaches are based on heuristics and the properties of the resulting clusterings are studied post hoc. However, in several applications, there is a natural cost function…

Much combinatorial optimisation problems constitute a non-polynomial (NP) hard optimisation problem, i.e., they can not be solved in polynomial time. One such problem is finding the shortest route between two nodes on a graph.…

Heuristic search has traditionally relied on hand-crafted or programmatically derived heuristics. Neural networks (NNs) are newer powerful tools which can be used to learn complex mappings from states to cost-to-go heuristics. However,…

Path finding in graphs is one of the most studied classes of problems in computer science. In this context, search algorithms are often extended with heuristics for a more efficient search of target nodes. In this work we combine recent…

We describe how to convert the heuristic search algorithm A* into an anytime algorithm that finds a sequence of improved solutions and eventually converges to an optimal solution. The approach we adopt uses weighted heuristic search to find…

In imitation learning for planning, parameters of heuristic functions are optimized against a set of solved problem instances. This work revisits the necessary and sufficient conditions of strictly optimally efficient heuristics for forward…

Greedy best-first search (GBFS) and A* search (A*) are popular algorithms for path-finding on large graphs. Both use so-called heuristic functions, which estimate how close a vertex is to the goal. While heuristic functions have been…

This work deals with a class of problems under interval data uncertainty, namely interval robust-hard problems, composed of interval data min-max regret generalizations of classical NP-hard combinatorial problems modeled as 0-1 integer…

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…

We study the problem of optimal traffic prediction and monitoring in large-scale networks. Our goal is to determine which subset of K links to monitor in order to "best" predict the traffic on the remaining links in the network. We consider…

Recently, the trend of incorporating differentiable algorithms into deep learning architectures arose in machine learning research, as the fusion of neural layers and algorithmic layers has been beneficial for handling combinatorial data,…

The growing amount of applications that generate vast amount of data in short time scales render the problem of partial monitoring, coupled with prediction, a rather fundamental one. We study the aforementioned canonical problem under the…

In unstructured environments like parking lots or construction sites, due to the large search-space and kinodynamic constraints of the vehicle, it is challenging to achieve real-time planning. Several state-of-the-art planners utilize…

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…

Designing good heuristic functions for graph search requires adequate domain knowledge. It is often easy to design heuristics that perform well and correlate with the underlying true cost-to-go values in certain parts of the search space…

Efficiently solving problems with large action spaces using A* search remains a significant challenge. This is because, for each iteration of A* search, the number of nodes generated and the number of heuristic function applications grow…

Combinatorial optimization problems arise in a wide range of applications from diverse domains. Many of these problems are NP-hard and designing efficient heuristics for them requires considerable time and experimentation. On the other…