Optimal Search with Neural Networks: Challenges and Approaches
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Work in machine learning has grown tremendously in the past years, but has had little to no impact on optimal search approaches. This paper looks at challenges in using deep learning as a part of optimal search, including what is feasible using current public frameworks, and what barriers exist for further adoption. The primary contribution of the paper is to show how to learn admissible heuristics through supervised learning from an existing heuristic. Several approaches are described, with the most successful approach being based on learning a heuristic as a classifier and then adjusting the quantile used with the classifier to ensure heuristic admissibility, which is required for optimal solutions. A secondary contribution is a description of the Batch A* algorithm, which can batch evaluations for more efficient use by the GPU. While ANNs can effectively learn heuristics that produce smaller search trees than alternate compression approaches, there still exists a time overhead when compared to efficient C++ implementations. This point of evaluation points out a challenge for future work.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 it