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Learning Abstract Planning Domains and Mappings to Real World Perceptions

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Book cover AI*IA 2019 – Advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI*IA 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 11946))

Abstract

Most of the works on planning and learning, e.g., planning by (model based) reinforcement learning, are based on two main assumptions: (i) the set of states of the planning domain is fixed; (ii) the mapping between the observations from the real word and the states is implicitly assumed, and is not part of the planning domain. Consequently, the focus is on learning the transitions between states. Current approaches address neither the problem of learning new states of the planning domain, nor the problem of representing and updating the mapping between the real world perceptions and the states. In this paper, we drop such assumptions. We provide a formal framework in which (i) the agent can learn dynamically new states of the planning domain; (ii) the mapping between abstract states and the perception from the real world, represented by continuous variables, is part of the planning domain; (iii) such mapping is learned and updated along the “life” of the agent. We define and develop an algorithm that interleaves planning, acting, and learning. We provide a first experimental evaluation that shows how this novel framework can effectively learn coherent abstract planning models.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The transition system can be either deterministic, nondeterministic, or stochastic.

  2. 2.

    In some works (see, e.g., [1, 4, 17]) the two levels are collapsed, since planning is performed in a continuous space.

  3. 3.

    We assume that the sequential plan returned by the planning algorithm can be transformed into a policy \(\pi \). Since here we plan for reachability goals, sequences of actions can be mapped into policies.

  4. 4.

    The code is available in the additional material.

  5. 5.

    The reviewer/reader interested to graphically see the computation of PAL on this simple example with different parameters can download the additional material and run the command .

  6. 6.

    A picture of this world is reported in the additonal material.

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Correspondence to Luciano Serafini .

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Serafini, L., Traverso, P. (2019). Learning Abstract Planning Domains and Mappings to Real World Perceptions. In: Alviano, M., Greco, G., Scarcello, F. (eds) AI*IA 2019 – Advances in Artificial Intelligence. AI*IA 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11946. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35166-3_33

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35166-3_33

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