Mischek, F., & Musliu, N. (2022). Reinforcement Learning for Cross-Domain Hyper-Heuristics. In L. De Raedt (Ed.), Proceedings of the Thirty-First International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-22) (pp. 4793–4799). International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2022/664
In this paper, we propose a new hyper-heuristic approach that uses reinforcement learning to automatically learn the selection of low-level heuristics across a wide range of problem domains. We provide a detailed analysis and evaluation of the algorithm components, including different ways to represent the hyper-heuristic state space and reset strategies to avoid unpromising areas of the solution space. Our methods have been evaluated using HyFlex, a well-known benchmarking framework for cross-domain hyper-heuristics, and compared with state-of-the-art approaches. The experimental evaluation shows that our reinforcement-learning based approach produces results that are competitive with the state-of-the-art, including the top participants of the Cross Domain Hyper-heuristic Search Competition 2011.
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Research Areas:
Logic and Computation: 80% Computer Science Foundations: 20%