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Publications & Technical Reports
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R153a
Memory Intensive AND/OR Search for Combinatorial Optimization in Graphical Models

Radu Marinescu and Rina Dechter

Abstract
In this paper we explore the impact of caching on search in the context of the recent framework of AND/OR search in graphical models. Specifically, we extend the depth-first AND/OR Branch-and-Bound tree search algorithm to explore an AND/OR search graph by equipping it with an adaptive caching scheme similar to good and no-good recording. Furthermore, we present best-first search algorithms for traversing the same underlying AND/OR search graph and compare both depth-first and best-first approaches empirically. We focus on two common optimization problems in graphical models: finding the Most Probable Explanation (MPE) in belief networks and solving Weighted CSPs (WCSP). In an extensive empirical evaluation we demonstrate conclusively the superiority of the memory intensive AND/OR search algorithms on a variety of benchmarks including random and real-world problem instances.

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