Domain-Dependent Parameter Selection of Search-based Algorithms Compatible with User Performance Criteria

Book One

Volume

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 20

Search

Search-based algorithms, like planners, schedulers and satisfiability solvers, are notorious for having numerous parameters with a wide choice of values that can affect their performance drastically. As a result, the users of these algorithms, who may not be search experts, spend a significant time in tuning the values of the parameters to get acceptable performance on their particular problem domains. In this paper, we present a learning-based approach for automatic tuning of search-based algorithms to help such users. The benefit of our methodology is that it handles diverse parameter types, performs effectively for a broad range of systematic as well as non-systematic search based solvers (the selected parameters could make the algorithms solve up to 100% problems while the bad parameters would lead to none being solved), incorporates user-specified performance criteria and is easy to implement. Moreover, the selected parameter will satisfy the performance criteria in the first try or the ranked candidates can be used along with the performance criteria to minimize the number of times the parameter settings need to be adjusted until a problem is solved.