Title
Learning to Search with MCTSnets.
Abstract
Planning problems are among the most important and well-studied problems in artificial intelligence. They are most typically solved by tree search algorithms that simulate ahead into the future, evaluate future states, and back-up those evaluations to the root of a search tree. Among these algorithms, Monte-Carlo tree search (MCTS) is one of the most general, powerful and widely used. A typical implementation of MCTS uses cleverly designed rules, optimised to the particular characteristics of the domain. These rules control where the simulation traverses, what to evaluate in the states that are reached, and how to back-up those evaluations. In this paper we instead learn where, what and how to search. Our architecture, which we call an MCTSnet, incorporates simulation-based search inside a neural network, by expanding, evaluating and backing-up a vector embedding. The parameters of the network are trained end-to-end using gradient-based optimisation. When applied to small searches in the well-known planning problem Sokoban, the learned search algorithm significantly outperformed MCTS baselines.
Year
Venue
DocType
2018
ICML
Conference
Volume
Citations 
PageRank 
abs/1802.04697
8
0.53
References 
Authors
15
8
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Arthur Guez12481100.43
Theophane Weber215916.79
Ioannis Antonoglou32977114.70
Karen Simonyan412058446.84
Oriol Vinyals59419418.45
Daan Wierstra65412255.92
Rémi Munos72240157.06
David Silver88252363.86