Learning to prune dominated action sequences in online black-box planning

Abstract

Black-box domains where the successor states generated by applying an action are generated by a completely opaque simulator pose a challenge for domain-independent planning. The main computational bottleneck in search-based planning for such domains is the number of calls to the black-box simulation. We propose a method for significantly reducing the number of calls to the simulator by the search algorithm by detecting and pruning sequences of actions which are dominated by others. We apply our pruning method to Iterated Width and breadth-first search in domain-independent blackbox planning for Atari 2600 games in the Arcade Learning Environment (ALE), adding our pruning method significantly improves upon the baseline algorithms.