Anytime planning algorithms often have hyperparameters that can be tuned at runtime to optimize their performance. While work on metareasoning has focused on when to interrupt an anytime planner and act on the current plan, the scope of metareasoning can be expanded to tuning the hyperparameters of the anytime planner at runtime. This paper introduces a general, decision-theoretic metareasoning approach that optimizes both the stopping point and hyperparameters of anytime planning. We begin by proposing a generalization of the standard meta-level control problem for anytime algorithms. We then offer a meta-level control technique that monitors and controls an anytime algorithm using deep reinforcement learning. Finally, we show that our approach boosts performance on a common benchmark domain that uses anytime weighted A* to solve a range of heuristic search problems and a mobile robot application that uses RRT* to solve motion planning problems.
Anytime Weighted A*---an anytime heuristic search algorithm that uses a weight to scale the heuristic value of each node in the open list---has proven to be an effective way to manage the trade-off between solution quality and computation time in heuristic search. Finding the best weight, however, is challenging because it depends on not only the characteristics of the domain and the details of the instance at hand, but also the available computation time. We propose a randomized version of this algorithm, called Randomized Weighted A*, that randomly adjusts its weight at runtime and show a counterintuitive phenomenon: RWA* generally performs as well or better than AWA* with the best static weight on a range of benchmark problems. The result is a simple algorithm that is easy to implement and performs consistently well without any offline experimentation or parameter tuning.
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