Bridging the Gap Between AI Planning and Reinforcement Learning (PRL @ IJCAI) – Workshop at IJCAI 2022 (July 24)
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This site presents the most up-to-date information about the PRL @ IJCAI workshop. Please, visit IJCAI 2022 for information about the general conference.
While AI Planning and Reinforcement Learning communities focus on similar sequential decision-making problems, these communities remain somewhat unaware of each other on specific problems, techniques, methodologies, and evaluation.
This workshop aims to encourage discussion and collaboration between the researchers in the fields of AI planning and reinforcement learning. We aim to bridge the gap between the two communities, facilitate the discussion of differences and similarities in existing techniques, and encourage collaboration across the fields. We solicit interest from AI researchers that work in the intersection of planning and reinforcement learning, in particular, those that focus on intelligent decision making. As such, the joint workshop program is an excellent opportunity to gather a large and diverse group of interested researchers.
Workshop topics
The workshop solicits work at the intersection of the fields of reinforcement learning and planning. One example is so-called goal-directed reinforcement learning, where a goal must be achieved, and no partial credit is given for getting closer to the goal. In this case, a usual metric is success rate. We also solicit work solely in one area that can influence advances in the other so long as the connections are clearly articulated in the submission.
Submissions are invited for topics on, but not limited to:
- Theoretical aspects of planning and reinforcement learning
- Goal-oriented sequential decision methods combining planning, RL or other ML methods.
- Goal-directed reinforcement learning (model-based, Bayesian, deep, etc.)
- Safe Reinforcement Learning and Planning
- Certification/analysis of learned policies/models
- Neuro-symbolic methods for RL
- Hierarchical RL and symbolic abstractions
- Compositional RL and symbolic methods
- Planning using approximated/uncertain (learned) models
- Monte Carlo Planning
- Applications of planning methods to RL
- Various levels of generalization (across goals, objects/domain, domains)
- Reinforcement Learning and planning competition(s)/benchmarks
IJCAI will be in-person this year. Authors of accepted workshop papers are expected to physically attend the conference and present in person.
Program
The event consists of:
- Invited talks. 45 minutes content + 15 minutes for questions.
- Sheila McIlraith (cancelled)
- Giuseppe De Giacomo
- Sriraam Natarajan
- Talks for accepted papers. 10 minutes content + 5 minutes for questions.
- Discussions: 30 minutes.
Schedule
Invited Speakers
Giuseppe De Giacomo
- Title: Deciding and Learning How to Act in Non-Markovian Settings
- Abstract: Autonomy is one of the grand objectives of AI. It is concerned with building autonomous agents/robots that operate in changing, incompletely known, unpredictable environments. Autonomy requires reasoning and planning capabilities, as well as learning from experience. Many areas of AI are concerned with autonomy, including Logic in AI, Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, Planning, Sequential Decision Making (MDPs), and Reinforcement Learning. Moreover, several objectives are shared with automated synthesis and strategic reasoning in Formal Methods. In this talk, we will show how one can merge reasoning on temporal logic and reinforcement learning to build autonomous agents that can act to accomplish temporally extended tasks in unknown environments. Handling Non-Markovianity will play a central role.
- Bio: Giuseppe De Giacomo is a full professor in Computer Science and Engineering at University of Roma La Sapienza. His research activity has concerned theoretical, methodological and practical aspects in different areas of AI and CS, most prominently Knowledge Representation, Reasoning about Actions, Generalized Planning, Autonomous Agents, Service Composition, Business Process Modeling, Data Management and Integration. He is AAAI Fellow, ACM Fellow, and EurAI Fellow. He has got an ERC Advanced Grant for the project WhiteMech: White-box Self Programming Mechanisms (2019-2024). He has been the Program Chair of ECAI 2020. He is on the Board of EurAI.
Sriraam Natarajan
- Title: Neurosymbolic learning via Integration of (Relational) Planning and (Deep) RL
- Abstract: One of the challenges in constructing a two level system, for instance, a higher-level deliberative planner with a lower level reactive RL agent, is the interface between these two systems. In this talk, I argue that this interface is crucial in constructing appropriate abstractions for the underlying RL agent to be efficient and effective. Specifically, I outline our RePReL system that constructs these abstractions automatically using a dynamic Statistical Relational Learning (SRL) language. Our experiments show that RePReL framework not only achieves better performance and efficient learning on the task at hand but also demonstrates better generalization to unseen tasks. The interface layer allows for the RL and planner components to be a plug and play system and I demonstrate the versatility of our approach on several tasks. This is joint work with our PhD student Harsha Kokel, Prasad Tadepalli and Balaraman Ravindran.
- Bio: Prof. Sriraam Natarajan is a Professor at the Department of Computer Science at University of Texas Dallas and a RBDSCAI Distinguished Faculty Fellow at IIT Madras. His research interests lie in the field of Artificial Intelligence, with emphasis on Machine Learning, Statistical Relational Learning and AI, Reinforcement Learning, Graphical Models and Biomedical Applications. He is a AAAI senior member and has received the Young Investigator award from US Army Research Office, Amazon Faculty Research Award, Intel Faculty Award, XEROX Faculty Award, Verisk Faculty Award and the IU trustees Teaching Award from Indiana University. He is the AI and society track chair of AAAI 2022 and 2023, demo chair of IJCAI 2022, program co-chair of SDM 2020 and ACM CoDS-COMAD 2020 conferences. He was the speciality chief editor of Frontiers in ML and AI journal, and is an associate editor of MLJ, JAIR, DAMI and Big Data journals.
Accepted submissions
- PG3: Policy-Guided Planning for Generalized Policy Generation. Ryan Yang, Tom Silver, Aidan Curtis, Tomas Lozano-Perez and Leslie Kaelbling.
- Heuristic Search Planning with Deep Neural Networks using Imitation, Attention and Curriculum Learning. Leah Chrestien, Tomáš Pevný, Stefan Edelkamp and Antonín Komenda.
- State Representation Learning for Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning. Lorenzo Steccanella and Anders Jonsson.
- Scaling up ML-based Black-box Planning with Partial STRIPS Models. Matias Greco, Álvaro Torralba, Jorge A. Baier and Hector Palacios.
- Graph-Based Representation of Automata Cascades with an Application to Regular Decision Processes. Alessandro Ronca and Giuseppe De Giacomo.
- Relational Abstractions for Generalized Reinforcement Learning on Symbolic Problems. Rushang Karia and Siddharth Srivastava.
- Exploiting Multiple Levels of Abstractions in Episodic RL via Reward Shaping. Roberto Cipollone, Giuseppe De Giacomo, Marco Favorito, Luca Iocchi and Fabio Patrizi.
- Compositional Reinforcement Learning from Logical Specifications. Kishor Jothimurugan, Suguman Bansal, Osbert Bastani and Rajeev Alur.
- Deep Policy Learning for Perfect Rectangle Packing. Boris Doux, Satya Tamby, Benjamin Negrevergne and Tristan Cazenave.
- Generalizing Behavior Trees and Motion-Generator (BTMG) Policy Representation for Robotic Tasks Over Scenario Parameters. Faseeh Ahmad, Matthias Mayr, Elin Anna Topp, Jacek Malec and Volker Krueger.
- Speeding-up Continual Learning through Information Gaines in Novel Experiences. Pierrick Lorang, Shivam Goel, Patrik Zips, Jivko Sinapov and Matthias Scheutz.
- An attention model for the formation of collectives in real-world domains. Adrià Fenoy Barceló, Filippo Bistaffa and Alessandro Farinelli.
Submission Procedure
We solicit workshop paper submissions relevant to the above call of the following types:
- Long papers – up to 8 pages + unlimited references / appendices
- Short papers – up to 4 pages + unlimited references / appendices
- Extended abstracts – up to 2 pages + unlimited references / appendices
Please format submissions in AAAI style (see instructions in Author Kit 2021 at AAAI, http://www.aaai.org/Publications/Templates/AuthorKit22.zip). Authors considering submitting to the workshop papers rejected from other conferences, please ensure you do your utmost to address the comments given by the reviewers.
New: NeurIPS format is also accepted with the same number of pages and references as the call-for-papers for the main-track.
Some accepted long papers will be accepted as contributed talks. All accepted long and short papers and extended abstracts will be given a slot in the poster presentation session. Extended abstracts are intended as brief summaries of already published papers, preliminary work, position papers or challenges that might help bridge the gap.
As the main purpose of this workshop is to solicit discussion, the authors are invited to use the appendix of their submissions for that purpose.
Paper submissions should be made through EasyChair.
Please send your inquiries by email to the organizers at prl.theworkshop@gmail.com.
For up-to-date information, please visit the PRL website, https://prl-theworkshop.github.io.
Important Dates
- Submission system opened:
Friday, April 29th, 2022 (UTC-12 timezone) - Submission deadline (Extended):
Friday, May 20th, 2022 (UTC-12 timezone) - Notification date:
Friday, June 3rd, 2022 - Camera-ready deadline:
Monday, July 11th, 2022 (UTC-12 timezone) - Workshop date: Vienna, July 24, 2022
Previous Editions
Organizers
- Michael Katz, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, NY, USA
- Hector Palacios, ServiceNow Research, Montreal, Canada
- Vicenç Gómez, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain