about
A* Search Without Expansions: Learning Heuristic Functions with Deep Q-Networks (arxiv.org)
38 points by tosh on Nov 23, 2023 | hide | past | pdf | 3 comments on HN

In plain words: Instead of trying every move and asking a guess function for each position, this search makes one call estimating the cost of all moves at once, without making them. It finds the shortest path and ran up to 129 times faster than A*.

Abstract

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 linearly with the size of the action space. This burden becomes even more apparent when A* search uses a heuristic function learned by computationally expensive function approximators, such as deep neural networks. To address this issue, we introduce Q*, a search algorithm that leverages heuristics capable of receiving a state and, in a single function call, returning cost-to-go estimates for all possible transitions from that state, along with estimates of the corresponding transition costs -- without the need to apply the transitions or generate the successor states; such action-state estimation are typically known as Q-values. This significantly reduces computation time and memory usage. In addition, we prove that Q* search is guaranteed to find a shortest path given a heuristic function that does not overestimate the sum of the transition cost and cost-to-go of the state. To obtain heuristics for Q* search, we employ a deep Q-network architecture to learn a state-action heuristic function from domain interaction, without any prior knowledge. We use Q* with our learned heuristic on different domains and action spaces, showing that Q* suffers from only a small runtime overhead as the size of the action space increases. In addition, our empirical results show Q* search is up to 129 times faster and generates up to 1288 times fewer nodes than A* search.

Forest Agostinelli, Shahaf S. Shperberg, Alexander Shmakov, Stephen McAleer, Roy Fox, Pierre Baldi
arXiv:2102.04518 · cs.AI, cs.LG · submitted Feb 8, 2021 · updated Oct 1, 2025
abstract · pdf · html · Added more detailed comparisons to A*, deffered heuristics, and partial expansion. Added more detailed theoretical results to show that Q* search is an admissible search algorithm. Added comparisons to deferred heuristic evaluation. Added experiments with Lights Out and the 35-Pancake puzzle

add comment on HN

I looked up some of these authors. I don’t think they’re affiliated with openai. This is an interesting paper but I don’t think it’s related to the Q* rumor
While true that it's not directly linked to OpenAI or Q, this paper is probably going viral now since it is somewhat related to what people know of the Q algorithm, and maybe folks are trying to figure out what it is and how it works, and this paper might be closest to it?
Makes sense