We introduce a new algorithm, Regression based Supervised Learning (RSL), for learning per instance Neural Network (NN) defined heuristic functions for classical planning problems. RSL uses regression to select relevant sets of states at a range of different distances from the goal. RSL then formulates a Supervised Learning problem to obtain the parameters that define the NN heuristic, using the selected states labeled with exact or estimated distances to goal states. Our experimental study shows that RSL outperforms, in terms of coverage, previous classical planning NN heuristics functions while requiring two orders of magnitude less training time.
Although heuristic search is one of the most successful approaches to classical planning, this planning paradigm does not apply straightforwardly to Generalized Planning (GP). Planning as heuristic search traditionally addresses the computation of sequential plans by searching in a grounded state-space. On the other hand GP aims at computing algorithm-like plans, that can branch and loop, and that generalize to a (possibly infinite) set of classical planning instances. This paper adapts the planning as heuristic search paradigm to the particularities of GP, and presents the first native heuris…
Although heuristic search is one of the most successful approaches to classical planning, this planning paradigm does not apply straightforwardly to Generalized Planning (GP). This paper adapts the planning as heuristic search paradigm to the particularities of GP, and presents the first native heuristic search approach to GP. First, the paper defines a program-based solution space for GP that is independent of the number of planning instances in a GP problem, and the size of these instances. Second, the paper defines the BFGP algorithm for GP, that implements a best-first search in our progra…
We investigate learning heuristics for domain-specific planning. Prior work framed learning a heuristic as an ordinary regression problem. However, in a greedy best-first search, the ordering of states induced by a heuristic is more indicative of the resulting planner's performance than mean squared error. Thus, we instead frame learning a heuristic as a learning to rank problem which we solve using a RankSVM formulation. Additionally, we introduce new methods for computing features that capture temporal interactions in an approximate plan. Our experiments on recent International Planning Comp…
Universitat Pompeu Fabra（庞培法布拉大学）；Universitat Politècnica de València（瓦伦西亚理工大学）
Planning as heuristic search is one of the most successful approaches to classical planning but unfortunately, it does not extend trivially to Generalized Planning (GP). GP aims to compute algorithmic solutions that are valid for a set of classical planning instances from a given domain, even if these instances differ in the number of objects, the number of state variables, their domain size, or their initial and goal configuration. The generalization requirements of GP make it impractical to perform the state-space search that is usually implemented by heuristic planners. This paper adapts th…
Imperial College London（伦敦帝国理工学院）；Fondazione Bruno Kessler（布鲁诺·凯斯勒基金会）
Automated planning remains one of the most general paradigms in Artificial Intelligence, providing means of solving problems coming from a wide variety of domains. One of the key factors restricting the applicability of planning is its computational complexity resulting from exponentially large search spaces. Heuristic approaches are necessary to solve all but the simplest problems. In this work, we explore the possibility of obtaining domain-independent heuristic functions using machine learning. This is a part of a wider research program whose objective is to improve practical applicability …
Current evaluation functions for heuristic planning are expensive to compute. In numerous planning problems these functions provide good guidance to the solution, so they are worth the expense. However, when evaluation functions are misguiding or when planning problems are large enough, lots of node evaluations must be computed, which severely limits the scalability of heuristic planners. In this paper, we present a novel solution for reducing node evaluations in heuristic planning based on machine learning. Particularly, we define the task of learning search control for heuristic planning as …
Planning in partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) remains a challenging topic in the artificial intelligence community, in spite of recent impressive progress in approximation techniques. Previous research has indicated that online planning approaches are promising in handling large-scale POMDP domains efficiently as they make decisions "on demand" instead of proactively for the entire state space. We present a Factored Hybrid Heuristic Online Planning (FHHOP) algorithm for large POMDPs. FHHOP gets its power by combining a novel hybrid heuristic search strategy with a recentl…
Landmarks are one of the most effective search heuristics for classical planning, but largely ignored in generalized planning. Generalized planning (GP) is usually addressed as a combinatorial search in a given space of algorithmic solutions, where candidate solutions are evaluated w.r.t.~the instances they solve. This type of solution evaluation ignores any sub-goal information that is not explicit in the representation of the planning instances, causing plateaus in the space of candidate generalized plans. Furthermore, node expansion in GP is a run-time bottleneck since it requires evaluatin…
Arizona State University（亚利桑那州立大学）；NASA Ames Research Center（美国国家航空航天局艾姆斯研究中心）
Some recent works in conditional planning have proposed reachability heuristics to improve planner scalability, but many lack a formal description of the properties of their distance estimates. To place previous work in context and extend work on heuristics for conditional planning, we provide a formal basis for distance estimates between belief states. We give a definition for the distance between belief states that relies on aggregating underlying state distance measures. We give several techniques to aggregate state distances and their associated properties. Many existing heuristics exhibit…
Technion - Israel Institute of Technology（以色列理工学院）
Domain-independent planning is one of the foundational areas in the field of Artificial Intelligence. A description of a planning task consists of an initial world state, a goal, and a set of actions for modifying the world state. The objective is to find a sequence of actions, that is, a plan, that transforms the initial world state into a goal state. In optimal planning, we are interested in finding not just a plan, but one of the cheapest plans. A prominent approach to optimal planning these days is heuristic state-space search, guided by admissible heuristic functions. Numerous admissible …
We describe and evaluate the algorithmic techniques that are used in the FF planning system. Like the HSP system, FF relies on forward state space search, using a heuristic that estimates goal distances by ignoring delete lists. Unlike HSP's heuristic, our method does not assume facts to be independent. We introduce a novel search strategy that combines hill-climbing with systematic search, and we show how other powerful heuristic information can be extracted and used to prune the search space. FF was the most successful automatic planner at the recent AIPS-2000 planning competition. We review…
In a recent paper, we have shown that Plan Recognition over STRIPS can be formulated and solved using Classical Planning heuristics and algorithms. In this work, we show that this formulation subsumes the standard formulation of Plan Recognition over libraries through a compilation of libraries into STRIPS theories. The libraries correspond to AND/OR graphs that may be cyclic and where children of AND nodes may be partially ordered. These libraries include Context-Free Grammars as a special case, where the Plan Recognition problem becomes a parsing with missing tokens problem. Plan Recognition…
Laboratoire d’Informatique de Paris Descartes（巴黎笛卡尔大学信息学实验室）；Université Paris Descartes（巴黎笛卡尔大学）
In this paper, we introduce a new heuristic search algorithm based on mean values for real-time planning, called MHSP. It consists in associating the principles of UCT, a bandit-based algorithm which gave very good results in computer games, and especially in Computer Go, with heuristic search in order to obtain a real-time planner in the context of classical planning. MHSP is evaluated on different planning problems and compared to existing algorithms performing on-line search and learning. Besides, our results highlight the capacity of MHSP to return plans in a real-time manner which tend to…
In recent years, the planning community has observed that techniques for learning heuristic functions have yielded improvements in performance. One approach is to use offline learning to learn predictive models from existing heuristics in a domain dependent manner. These learned models are deployed as new heuristic functions. The learned models can in turn be tuned online using a domain independent error correction approach to further enhance their informativeness. The online tuning approach is domain independent but instance specific, and contributes to improved performance for individual ins…
Hierarchical Task Network Planning with LLM-Generated Heuristics
University of Aberdeen, UK（爱丁堡大学（英国））；PUCRS, Brazil（巴西普埃布拉联邦大学）；University of Oxford, UK（牛津大学（英国））；Saarland University, Germany（萨尔大学（德国））；Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil（巴西里约格兰德 do 南大学）
This paper presents GRT, a domain-independent heuristic planning system for STRIPS worlds. GRT solves problems in two phases. In the pre-processing phase, it estimates the distance between each fact and the goals of the problem, in a backward direction. Then, in the search phase, these estimates are used in order to further estimate the distance between each intermediate state and the goals, guiding so the search process in a forward direction and on a best-first basis. The paper presents the benefits from the adoption of opposite directions between the preprocessing and the search phases, dis…
Although the use of metric fluents is fundamental to many practical planning problems, the study of heuristics to support fully automated planners working with these fluents remains relatively unexplored. The most widely used heuristic is the relaxation of metric fluents into interval-valued variables --- an idea first proposed a decade ago. Other heuristics depend on domain encodings that supply additional information about fluents, such as capacity constraints or other resource-related annotations. A particular challenge to these approaches is in handling interactions between metric fluents …
Technion - Israel Institute of Technology（以色列理工学院）；University of Innsbruck（因斯布鲁克大学）
We present a new algorithm for probabilistic planning with no observability. Our algorithm, called Probabilistic-FF, extends the heuristic forward-search machinery of Conformant-FF to problems with probabilistic uncertainty about both the initial state and action effects. Specifically, Probabilistic-FF combines Conformant-FFs techniques with a powerful machinery for weighted model counting in (weighted) CNFs, serving to elegantly define both the search space and the heuristic function. Our evaluation of Probabilistic-FF shows its fine scalability in a range of probabilistic domains, constituti…
Fast Downward is a classical planning system based on heuristic search. It can deal with general deterministic planning problems encoded in the propositional fragment of PDDL2.2, including advanced features like ADL conditions and effects and derived predicates (axioms). Like other well-known planners such as HSP and FF, Fast Downward is a progression planner, searching the space of world states of a planning task in the forward direction. However, unlike other PDDL planning systems, Fast Downward does not use the propositional PDDL representation of a planning task directly. Instead, the inpu…
School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学计算机学院）
VHPOP is a partial order causal link (POCL) planner loosely based on UCPOP. It draws from the experience gained in the early to mid 1990's on flaw selection strategies for POCL planning, and combines this with more recent developments in the field of domain independent planning such as distance based heuristics and reachability analysis. We present an adaptation of the additive heuristic for plan space planning, and modify it to account for possible reuse of existing actions in a plan. We also propose a large set of novel flaw selection strategies, and show how these can help us solve more pro…
University of Basel（巴塞尔大学）；Universidad Simón Bolívar（西蒙玻利瓦尔大学）
Potential heuristics for state-space search are defined as weighted sums over simple state features. Atomic features consider the value of a single state variable in a factored state representation, while binary features consider joint assignments to two state variables. Previous work showed that the set of all admissible and consistent potential heuristics using atomic features can be characterized by a compact set of linear constraints. We generalize this result to binary features and prove a hardness result for features of higher dimension. Furthermore, we prove a tractability result based …
State-space search with explicit abstraction heuristics is at the state of the art of cost-optimal planning. These heuristics are inherently limited, nonetheless, because the size of the abstract space must be bounded by some, even if a very large, constant. Targeting this shortcoming, we introduce the notion of (additive) implicit abstractions, in which the planning task is abstracted by instances of tractable fragments of optimal planning. We then introduce a concrete setting of this framework, called fork-decomposition, that is based on two novel fragments of tractable cost-optimal planning…
NASA Ames Research Center（NASA艾姆斯研究中心）；LAAS-CNRS；Ben-Gurion University（本-古里安大学）；Mississippi State University（密西西比州立大学）；University of Washington（华盛顿大学）
We consider the problem of optimal planning in stochastic domains with resource constraints, where the resources are continuous and the choice of action at each step depends on resource availability. We introduce the HAO* algorithm, a generalization of the AO* algorithm that performs search in a hybrid state space that is modeled using both discrete and continuous state variables, where the continuous variables represent monotonic resources. Like other heuristic search algorithms, HAO* leverages knowledge of the start state and an admissible heuristic to focus computational effort on those par…
Modern software systems increasingly incorporate self-* behavior to adapt to changes in the environment at runtime. Such adaptations often involve reconfiguring the software architecture of the system. Many systems also need to manage their architecture themselves, i.e., they need a planning component to autonomously decide which reconfigurations to execute to reach a desired target configuration. For the specification of reconfigurations, we employ graph transformations systems (GTS) due to the close relation of graphs and UML object diagrams. We solve the resulting planning problems with a p…
The hm admissible heuristics for (sequential and temporal) regression planning are defined by a parameterized relaxation of the optimal cost function in the regression search space, where the parameter m offers a trade-off between the accuracy and computational cost of theheuristic. Existing methods for computing the hm heuristic require time exponential in m, limiting them to small values (m andlt= 2). The hm heuristic can also be viewed as the optimal cost function in a relaxation of the search space: this paper presents relaxed search, a method for computing this function partially by searc…
We present the first approach capable of learning domain-independent planning heuristics entirely from scratch. The heuristics we learn map the hypergraph representation of the delete-relaxation of the planning problem at hand, to a cost estimate that approximates that of the least-cost path from the current state to the goal through the hypergraph. We generalise Graph Networks to obtain a new framework for learning over hypergraphs, which we specialise to learn planning heuristics by training over state/value pairs obtained from optimal cost plans. Our experiments show that the resulting arch…
LAMA is a classical planning system based on heuristic forward search. Its core feature is the use of a pseudo-heuristic derived from landmarks, propositional formulas that must be true in every solution of a planning task. LAMA builds on the Fast Downward planning system, using finite-domain rather than binary state variables and multi-heuristic search. The latter is employed to combine the landmark heuristic with a variant of the well-known FF heuristic. Both heuristics are cost-sensitive, focusing on high-quality solutions in the case where actions have non-uniform cost. A weighted A* searc…
Decades of research have been invested in making computer programs for playing games such as Chess and Go. This paper focuses on a new game, Tetris Link, a board game that is still lacking any scientific analysis. Tetris Link has a large branching factor, hampering a traditional heuristic planning approach. We explore heuristic planning and two other approaches: Reinforcement Learning, Monte Carlo tree search. We document our approach and report on their relative performance in a tournament. Curiously, the heuristic approach is stronger than the planning/learning approaches. However, experienc…
Learning a well-informed heuristic function for hard task planning domains is an elusive problem. Although there are known neural network architectures to represent such heuristic knowledge, it is not obvious what concrete information is learned and whether techniques aimed at understanding the structure help in improving the quality of the heuristics. This paper presents a network model to learn a heuristic capable of relating distant parts of the state space via optimal plan imitation using the attention mechanism, which drastically improves the learning of a good heuristic function. To coun…
Planning with numeric state variables has been a challenge for many years, and was a part of the 3rd International Planning Competition (IPC-3). Currently one of the most popular and successful algorithmic techniques in STRIPS planning is to guide search by a heuristic function, where the heuristic is based on relaxing the planning task by ignoring the delete lists of the available actions. We present a natural extension of ``ignoring delete lists'' to numeric state variables, preserving the relevant theoretical properties of the STRIPS relaxation under the condition that the numeric task at h…
Institute for Systems Analysis of Russian Academy of Sciences（俄罗斯科学院系统分析研究所）
Path planning is typically considered in Artificial Intelligence as a graph searching problem and R* is state-of-the-art algorithm tailored to solve it. The algorithm decomposes given path finding task into the series of subtasks each of which can be easily (in computational sense) solved by well-known methods (such as A*). Parameterized random choice is used to perform the decomposition and as a result R* performance largely depends on the choice of its input parameters. In our work we formulate a range of assumptions concerning possible upper and lower bounds of R* parameters, their interdep…
Domain-general model-based planners often derive their generality by constructing search heuristics through the relaxation or abstraction of symbolic world models. We illustrate how abstract interpretation can serve as a unifying framework for these abstraction-based heuristics, extending the reach of heuristic search to richer world models that make use of more complex datatypes and functions (e.g. sets, geometry), and even models with uncertainty and probabilistic effects. These heuristics can also be integrated with learning, allowing agents to jumpstart planning in novel world models via a…
Knexus Research Corporation（Knexus研究公司）；MITRE（MITRE公司）；Naval Research Laboratory（海军研究实验室）
There is an impressive body of work on developing heuristics and other reasoning algorithms to guide search in optimal and anytime planning algorithms for classical planning. However, very little effort has been directed towards developing analogous techniques to guide search towards high-quality solutions in hierarchical planning formalisms like HTN planning, which allows using additional domain-specific procedural control knowledge. In lieu of such techniques, this control knowledge often needs to provide the necessary search guidance to the planning algorithm, which imposes a substantial bu…
State-of-the-art approaches to partially observable planning like POMCP are based on stochastic tree search. While these approaches are computationally efficient, they may still construct search trees of considerable size, which could limit the performance due to restricted memory resources. In this paper, we propose Partially Observable Stacked Thompson Sampling (POSTS), a memory bounded approach to open-loop planning in large POMDPs, which optimizes a fixed size stack of Thompson Sampling bandits. We empirically evaluate POSTS in four large benchmark problems and compare its performance with…
