Learn-and-Optimize: a Parameter Tuning Framework for Evolutionary AI Planning

International audienceLearn-and-Optimize (LaO) is a generic surrogate based method for parameter tuning combining learning and optimization. In this paper LaO is used to tune Divide-and-Evolve (DaE), an Evolutionary Algorithm for AI Planning. The LaO framework makes it possible to learn the relation between some features describing a given instance and the optimal parameters for this instance, thus it enables to extrapolate this relation to unknown instances in the same domain. Moreover, the learned knowledge is used as a surrogate-model to accelerate the search for the optimal parameters. The proposed implementation of LaO uses an Arti cial Neural Network for learning the mapping between features and optimal parameters, and the Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy for optimization. Results demonstrate that LaO is capable of improving the quality of the DaE results even with only a few iterations. The main limitation of the DaE case-study is the limited amount of meaningful features that are available to describe the instances. However, the learned model reaches almost the same performance on the test instances, which means that it is capable of generalization