There has been a lot of progress in this field in the research community. Two good papers:
* https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/AAAI/article/view/11027 * https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.03978
* https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/AAAI/article/view/11027 * https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.03978
It's about "planning" (ie. searching an action space) which does not generally have a heuristic, so it needs to do "exploration" (which is exactly the opposite of what you want for optimal path finding) to counteract getting stuck in local optima due to greedy search...