SLAP: Shortcut Learning for Abstract Planning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Liu, Y. Isabel, Li, Bowen, Eysenbach, Benjamin, Silver, Tom
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Liu, Y. Isabel
Li, Bowen
Eysenbach, Benjamin
Silver, Tom
author_facet Liu, Y. Isabel
Li, Bowen
Eysenbach, Benjamin
Silver, Tom
contents Long-horizon decision-making with sparse rewards and continuous states and actions remains a fundamental challenge in AI and robotics. Task and motion planning (TAMP) is a model-based framework that addresses this challenge by planning hierarchically with abstract actions (options). These options are manually defined, limiting the agent to behaviors that we as human engineers know how to program (pick, place, move). In this work, we propose Shortcut Learning for Abstract Planning (SLAP), a method that leverages existing TAMP options to automatically discover new ones. Our key idea is to use model-free reinforcement learning (RL) to learn shortcuts in the abstract planning graph induced by the existing options in TAMP. Without any additional assumptions or inputs, shortcut learning leads to shorter solutions than pure planning, and higher task success rates than flat and hierarchical RL. Qualitatively, SLAP discovers dynamic physical improvisations (e.g., slap, wiggle, wipe) that differ significantly from the manually-defined ones. In experiments in four simulated robotic environments, we show that SLAP solves and generalizes to a wide range of tasks, reducing overall plan lengths by over 50% and consistently outperforming planning and RL baselines.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_01107
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SLAP: Shortcut Learning for Abstract Planning
Liu, Y. Isabel
Li, Bowen
Eysenbach, Benjamin
Silver, Tom
Robotics
Machine Learning
Long-horizon decision-making with sparse rewards and continuous states and actions remains a fundamental challenge in AI and robotics. Task and motion planning (TAMP) is a model-based framework that addresses this challenge by planning hierarchically with abstract actions (options). These options are manually defined, limiting the agent to behaviors that we as human engineers know how to program (pick, place, move). In this work, we propose Shortcut Learning for Abstract Planning (SLAP), a method that leverages existing TAMP options to automatically discover new ones. Our key idea is to use model-free reinforcement learning (RL) to learn shortcuts in the abstract planning graph induced by the existing options in TAMP. Without any additional assumptions or inputs, shortcut learning leads to shorter solutions than pure planning, and higher task success rates than flat and hierarchical RL. Qualitatively, SLAP discovers dynamic physical improvisations (e.g., slap, wiggle, wipe) that differ significantly from the manually-defined ones. In experiments in four simulated robotic environments, we show that SLAP solves and generalizes to a wide range of tasks, reducing overall plan lengths by over 50% and consistently outperforming planning and RL baselines.
title SLAP: Shortcut Learning for Abstract Planning
topic Robotics
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.01107