Recent machine-learning approaches to deterministic search and domain-independent planning employ policy learning to speed up search. Unfortunately, when attempting to solve a search problem by successively applying a policy, no guarantees can be given on solution quality. The problem of how to effectively use a learned policy within a bounded-suboptimal search algorithm remains largely as an open question. In this paper, we propose various ways in which such policies can be integrated into Focal Search, assuming that the policy is a neural network classifier. Furthermore, we provide mathematical foundations for some of the resulting algorithms. To evaluate the resulting algorithms over a number of policies with varying accuracy, we use synthetic policies which can be generated for a target accuracy for problems where the search space can be held in memory. We evaluate our focal search variants over three benchmark domains using our synthetic approach, and on the 15-puzzle using a neural network learned using 1.5 million examples. We observe that \emph{Discrepancy Focal Search}, which we show expands the node which maximizes an approximation of the probability that its corresponding path is a prefix of an optimal path, obtains, in general, the best results in terms of runtime and solution quality.

The AAAI-12 Workshop program was held Sunday and Monday, July 22–23, 2012 at the Sheraton Centre Toronto Hotel in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The AAAI-12 workshop program included 9 workshops covering a wide range of topics in artificial intelligence. The titles of the workshops were Activity Context Representation: Techniques and Languages, AI for Data Center Management and Cloud Computing, Cognitive Robotics, Grounding Language for Physical Systems, Human Computation, Intelligent Techniques for Web Personalization and Recommendation, Multiagent Pathfinding, Neural-Symbolic Learning and Reasoning, Problem Solving Using Classical Planners, Semantic Cities. This article presents short summaries of those events.