让深度学习的启发式函数保证不高估,提升搜索效率与可靠性。
Learning Admissible Heuristics for A*: Theory and Practice
- 用交叉熵约束训练,确保启发式函数始终不夸大真实开销。
- 在魔方任务中,新方法比传统模式数据库引导力更强。
- 首次给出目标相关启发式函数的泛化理论保障,适合算法研究者。
启发式函数是A*等搜索算法性能的核心,其中可接受性(即永不夸大真实最短路径开销)能保证解的最优性。近期深度学习方法常忽略可接受性,且对训练数据外的泛化能力缺乏保障。本文从约束优化角度建模启发式学习,提出交叉熵可接受性(CEA)损失函数,在训练中强制满足可接受性。在魔方领域,该方法生成近似可接受的启发式函数,其引导能力显著优于压缩模式数据库(PDB)启发式。理论上,结合PDB抽象与魔方图结构特性,我们收紧了A*算法泛化所需的训练样本数量上界。使用ReLU神经网络时,样本复杂度主要依赖网络宽度与深度,而非图规模。同时,首次为依赖目标的启发式函数提供了泛化保证。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
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 approaches often disregard admissibility and provide limited guarantees on generalization beyond the training data. This paper addresses both of these limitations. First, we pose heuristic learning as a constrained optimization problem and introduce Cross-Entropy Admissibility (CEA), a loss function that enforces admissibility during training. On the Rubik's Cube domain, this method yields near-admissible heuristics with significantly stronger guidance than compressed pattern database (PDB) heuristics. Theoretically, we study the sample complexity of learning heuristics. By leveraging PDB abstractions and the structural properties of graphs such as the Rubik's Cube, we tighten the bound on the number of training samples needed for A-star to generalize. Replacing a general hypothesis class with a ReLU neural network gives bounds that depend primarily on the network's width and depth, rather than on graph size. Using the same network, we also provide the first generalization guarantees for goal-dependent heuristics.
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