Searching Without a Heuristic: Efficient Use of Abstraction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In problem domains where an informative heuristic evaluation function is not known or not easily computed, abstraction can be used to derive admissible heuristic values. Optimal path lengths in the abstracted problem are consistent heuristic estimates for the original problem. Pattern databases are the traditional method of creating such heuristics, but they exhaustively compute costs for all abstract states and are thus usually appropriate only when all instances share the same single goal state. Hierarchical heuristic search algorithms address these shortcomings by searching for paths in the abstract space on an as-needed basis. However, existing hierarchical algorithms search less efficiently than pattern database constructors: abstract nodes may be expanded many times during the course of a base-level search. We present a novel hierarchical heuristic search algorithm, called Switchback, that uses an alternating direction of search to avoid abstract node re-expansions. This algorithm is simple to implement and demonstrates superior performance to existing hierarchical heuristic search algorithms on several standard benchmarks.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".