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Main Authors: Brugnara, Irene, Valentini, Alessandro, Micheli, Andrea
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.13372
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author Brugnara, Irene
Valentini, Alessandro
Micheli, Andrea
author_facet Brugnara, Irene
Valentini, Alessandro
Micheli, Andrea
contents Recent work investigated the use of Reinforcement Learning (RL) for the synthesis of heuristic guidance to improve the performance of temporal planners when a domain is fixed and a set of training problems (not plans) is given. The idea is to extract a heuristic from the value function of a particular (possibly infinite-state) MDP constructed over the training problems. In this paper, we propose an evolution of this learning and planning framework that focuses on exploiting the information provided by symbolic heuristics during both the RL and planning phases. First, we formalize different reward schemata for the synthesis and use symbolic heuristics to mitigate the problems caused by the truncation of episodes needed to deal with the potentially infinite MDP. Second, we propose learning a residual of an existing symbolic heuristic, which is a "correction" of the heuristic value, instead of eagerly learning the whole heuristic from scratch. Finally, we use the learned heuristic in combination with a symbolic heuristic using a multiple-queue planning approach to balance systematic search with imperfect learned information. We experimentally compare all the approaches, highlighting their strengths and weaknesses and significantly advancing the state of the art for this planning and learning schema.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_13372
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Exploiting Symbolic Heuristics for the Synthesis of Domain-Specific Temporal Planning Guidance using Reinforcement Learning
Brugnara, Irene
Valentini, Alessandro
Micheli, Andrea
Artificial Intelligence
Recent work investigated the use of Reinforcement Learning (RL) for the synthesis of heuristic guidance to improve the performance of temporal planners when a domain is fixed and a set of training problems (not plans) is given. The idea is to extract a heuristic from the value function of a particular (possibly infinite-state) MDP constructed over the training problems. In this paper, we propose an evolution of this learning and planning framework that focuses on exploiting the information provided by symbolic heuristics during both the RL and planning phases. First, we formalize different reward schemata for the synthesis and use symbolic heuristics to mitigate the problems caused by the truncation of episodes needed to deal with the potentially infinite MDP. Second, we propose learning a residual of an existing symbolic heuristic, which is a "correction" of the heuristic value, instead of eagerly learning the whole heuristic from scratch. Finally, we use the learned heuristic in combination with a symbolic heuristic using a multiple-queue planning approach to balance systematic search with imperfect learned information. We experimentally compare all the approaches, highlighting their strengths and weaknesses and significantly advancing the state of the art for this planning and learning schema.
title Exploiting Symbolic Heuristics for the Synthesis of Domain-Specific Temporal Planning Guidance using Reinforcement Learning
topic Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.13372