Title
Limits to Learning in Reinforcement Learning Hyper-heuristics.
Abstract
Learning mechanisms in selection hyper-heuristics are used to identify the most appropriate subset of heuristics when solving a given problem. Several experimental studies have used additive reinforcement learning mechanisms, however, these are inconclusive with regard to the performance of selection hyper-heuristics with these learning mechanisms. This paper points out limitations to learning with additive reinforcement learning mechanisms. Our theoretical results show that if the probability of improving the candidate solution in each point of the search process is less than 1 / 2 which is a mild assumption, then additive reinforcement learning mechanisms perform asymptotically similar to the simple random mechanism which chooses heuristics uniformly at random. In addition, frequently used adaptation schemes can affect the memory of reinforcement learning mechanisms negatively. We also conducted experiments on two well-known combinatorial optimisation problems, bin-packing and flow-shop, and the obtained results confirm the theoretical findings. This study suggests that alternatives to the additive updates in reinforcement learning mechanisms should be considered.
Year
Venue
Field
2016
EvoCOP
Simple random sample,Computer science,Heuristics,Artificial intelligence,Error-driven learning,Reinforcement learning
DocType
Citations 
PageRank 
Conference
2
0.38
References 
Authors
11
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Fawaz Alanazi120.38
Per Kristian Lehre262742.60