Learning Admissible Heuristics for A*: Theory and Practice

Heuristic functions are central to the performance of search algorithms such as A*, where \emph{admissibility}—the property of never overestimating the true shortest-path cost—guarantees solution optimality. Recent deep learning approaches often disregard full admissibility and provide limited guarantees on generalization beyond the training data. We address both of these limitations. First, we pose heuristic learning as a constrained optimization problem and introduce \emph{Cross-Entropy Admissibility (CEA)}, a loss function that enforces admissibility during training. When evaluated on the Rubik’s Cube domain, our method yields heuristics with near-perfect admissibility and significantly stronger guidance than compressed pattern database (PDB) heuristics. On the theoretical side, we derive a new upper bound on the expected suboptimality of A*. By leveraging PDB abstractions and the structural properties of graphs such as the Rubik’s Cube, we tighten the bound on the number of training samples needed for A* to generalize to unseen states. Replacing a general hypothesis class with a ReLU neural network gives bounds that depend primarily on the network’s width and depth, rather than on graph size. Using the same network, we also provide the first generalization guarantees for \emph{goal-dependent} heuristics.