920,425 research outputs found
Evaluation of a Simple, Scalable, Parallel Best-First Search Strategy
Large-scale, parallel clusters composed of commodity processors are
increasingly available, enabling the use of vast processing capabilities and
distributed RAM to solve hard search problems. We investigate Hash-Distributed
A* (HDA*), a simple approach to parallel best-first search that asynchronously
distributes and schedules work among processors based on a hash function of the
search state. We use this approach to parallelize the A* algorithm in an
optimal sequential version of the Fast Downward planner, as well as a 24-puzzle
solver. The scaling behavior of HDA* is evaluated experimentally on a shared
memory, multicore machine with 8 cores, a cluster of commodity machines using
up to 64 cores, and large-scale high-performance clusters, using up to 2400
processors. We show that this approach scales well, allowing the effective
utilization of large amounts of distributed memory to optimally solve problems
which require terabytes of RAM. We also compare HDA* to Transposition-table
Driven Scheduling (TDS), a hash-based parallelization of IDA*, and show that,
in planning, HDA* significantly outperforms TDS. A simple hybrid which combines
HDA* and TDS to exploit strengths of both algorithms is proposed and evaluated.Comment: in press, to appear in Artificial Intelligenc
Best-first heuristic search for multicore machines
To harness modern multicore processors, it is imperative to develop parallel versions of fundamental algorithms. In this paper, we compare different approaches to parallel best-first search in a shared-memory setting. We present a new method, PBNF, that uses abstraction to partition the state space and to detect duplicate states without requiring frequent locking. PBNF allows speculative expansions when necessary to keep threads busy. We identify and fix potential livelock conditions in our approach, proving its correctness using temporal logic. Our approach is general, allowing it to extend easily to suboptimal and anytime heuristic search. In an empirical comparison on STRIPS planning, grid pathfinding, and sliding tile puzzle problems using 8-core machines, we show that A*, weighted A* and Anytime weighted A* implemented using PBNF yield faster search than improved versions of previous parallel search proposals
B-LOG: A branch and bound methodology for the parallel execution of logic programs
We propose a computational methodology -"B-LOG"-, which offers the potential for an effective implementation of Logic Programming in a parallel computer. We also propose a weighting scheme to guide the search process through the graph and we apply the concepts of parallel "branch and bound" algorithms in order to perform a "best-first" search using an information theoretic bound. The concept of "session" is used to speed up the search process in a succession of similar queries. Within a session, we strongly modify the bounds in a local database, while bounds kept in a global database are weakly modified to provide a better initial condition for other sessions. We
also propose an implementation scheme based on a database
machine using "semantic paging", and the "B-LOG processor" based on a scoreboard driven controller
Beam Search Strategies for Neural Machine Translation
The basic concept in Neural Machine Translation (NMT) is to train a large
Neural Network that maximizes the translation performance on a given parallel
corpus. NMT is then using a simple left-to-right beam-search decoder to
generate new translations that approximately maximize the trained conditional
probability. The current beam search strategy generates the target sentence
word by word from left-to- right while keeping a fixed amount of active
candidates at each time step. First, this simple search is less adaptive as it
also expands candidates whose scores are much worse than the current best.
Secondly, it does not expand hypotheses if they are not within the best scoring
candidates, even if their scores are close to the best one. The latter one can
be avoided by increasing the beam size until no performance improvement can be
observed. While you can reach better performance, this has the draw- back of a
slower decoding speed. In this paper, we concentrate on speeding up the decoder
by applying a more flexible beam search strategy whose candidate size may vary
at each time step depending on the candidate scores. We speed up the original
decoder by up to 43% for the two language pairs German-English and
Chinese-English without losing any translation quality.Comment: First Workshop on Neural Machine Translation, 201
Parallel repetition for entangled k-player games via fast quantum search
We present two parallel repetition theorems for the entangled value of
multi-player, one-round free games (games where the inputs come from a product
distribution). Our first theorem shows that for a -player free game with
entangled value , the -fold repetition of
has entangled value at most , where is the answer length of any
player. In contrast, the best known parallel repetition theorem for the
classical value of two-player free games is , due to Barak, et al. (RANDOM 2009). This
suggests the possibility of a separation between the behavior of entangled and
classical free games under parallel repetition.
Our second theorem handles the broader class of free games where the
players can output (possibly entangled) quantum states. For such games, the
repeated entangled value is upper bounded by . We also show that the dependence of the exponent
on is necessary: we exhibit a -player free game and such
that .
Our analysis exploits the novel connection between communication protocols
and quantum parallel repetition, first explored by Chailloux and Scarpa (ICALP
2014). We demonstrate that better communication protocols yield better parallel
repetition theorems: our first theorem crucially uses a quantum search protocol
by Aaronson and Ambainis, which gives a quadratic speed-up for distributed
search problems. Finally, our results apply to a broader class of games than
were previously considered before; in particular, we obtain the first parallel
repetition theorem for entangled games involving more than two players, and for
games involving quantum outputs.Comment: This paper is a significantly revised version of arXiv:1411.1397,
which erroneously claimed strong parallel repetition for free entangled
games. Fixed author order to alphabetica
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