Abstract

H. Zhang, O. Salzman, A. Felner, S. Kumar, S. Skyler, C. Hernandez and S. Koenig. Towards Effective Multi-Valued Heuristics for Bi-Objective Shortest-Path Algorithms via Differential Heuristics. In Symposium on Combinatorial Search (SoCS), pages 101-109, 2023.

Abstract: In bi-objective graph search, each edge is annotated with a cost pair, where each cost corresponds to an objective to optimize. We are interested in finding all undominated paths from a given start state to a given goal state (called the Pareto front). Almost all existing works of bi-objective search use single-valued heuristics, which use one number for each objective, to estimate the cost between any given state and the goal state. However, single-valued heuristics cannot reflect the trade-offs between the two costs. On the other hand, multi-valued heuristics use a set of pairs to estimate the Pareto front between any given state and the goal state and are more informed than single-valued heuristics. However, they are rarely studied and have yet to be investigated in explicit state spaces by any existing work. In this paper, we are interested in using multi-valued heuristics to improve bi-objective search algorithms in explicit state spaces. More specifically, we generalize Differential Heuristics (DHs), a class of memory-based heuristics for single-objective search, to bi-objective search, resulting in Bi-objective Differential Heuristics (BO-DHs). We propose several techniques to reduce the memory usage and computational overhead of BO-DHs significantly. Our experimental results show that, with suggested improvement and tuned parameters, BO-DHs can reduce the node expansion and runtime of a bi-objective search algorithm by up to an order of magnitude, paving the way for more effective multi-valued heuristics. Comment: This version fixes a typo in the published version. It now says 'that is equal to p or is the comin of p and other pairs' where the original text said 'comax' instead of 'comin.'

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