No Arabic abstract
Recently Bonet and Geffner have shown that first-order representations for planning domains can be learned from the structure of the state space without any prior knowledge about the action schemas or domain predicates. For this, the learning problem is formulated as the search for a simplest first-order domain description D that along with information about instances I_i (number of objects and initial state) determine state space graphs G(P_i) that match the observed state graphs G_i where P_i = (D, I_i). The search is cast and solved approximately by means of a SAT solver that is called over a large family of propositional theories that differ just in the parameters encoding the possible number of action schemas and domain predicates, their arities, and the number of objects. In this work, we push the limits of these learners by moving to an answer set programming (ASP) encoding using the CLINGO system. The new encodings are more transparent and concise, extending the range of possible models while facilitating their exploration. We show that the domains introduced by Bonet and Geffner can be solved more efficiently in the new approach, often optimally, and furthermore, that the approach can be easily extended to handle partial information about the state graphs as well as noise that prevents some states from being distinguished.
Recent work in deep reinforcement learning (RL) has produced algorithms capable of mastering challenging games such as Go, chess, or shogi. In these works the RL agent directly observes the natural state of the game and controls that state directly with its actions. However, when humans play such games, they do not just reason about the moves but also interact with their physical environment. They understand the state of the game by looking at the physical board in front of them and modify it by manipulating pieces using touch and fine-grained motor control. Mastering complicated physical systems with abstract goals is a central challenge for artificial intelligence, but it remains out of reach for existing RL algorithms. To encourage progress towards this goal we introduce a set of physically embedded planning problems and make them publicly available. We embed challenging symbolic tasks (Sokoban, tic-tac-toe, and Go) in a physics engine to produce a set of tasks that require perception, reasoning, and motor control over long time horizons. Although existing RL algorithms can tackle the symbol
Recently, researchers in answer set programming and constraint programming spent significant efforts in the development of hybrid languages and solving algorithms combining the strengths of these traditionally separate fields. These efforts resulted in a new research area: constraint answer set programming (CASP). CASP languages and systems proved to be largely successful at providing efficient solutions to problems involving hybrid reasoning tasks, such as scheduling problems with elements of planning. Yet, the development of CASP systems is difficult, requiring non-trivial expertise in multiple areas. This suggests a need for a study identifying general development principles of hybrid systems. Once these principles and their implications are well understood, the development of hybrid languages and systems may become a well-established and well-understood routine process. As a step in this direction, in this paper we conduct a case study aimed at evaluating various integration schemas of CASP methods.
The encoding of solutions in black-box optimization is a delicate, handcrafted balance between expressiveness and domain knowledge -- between exploring a wide variety of solutions, and ensuring that those solutions are useful. Our main insight is that this process can be automated by generating a dataset of high-performing solutions with a quality diversity algorithm (here, MAP-Elites), then learning a representation with a generative model (here, a Variational Autoencoder) from that dataset. Our second insight is that this representation can be used to scale quality diversity optimization to higher dimensions -- but only if we carefully mix solutions generated with the learned representation and those generated with traditional variation operators. We demonstrate these capabilities by learning an low-dimensional encoding for the inverse kinematics of a thousand joint planar arm. The results show that learned representations make it possible to solve high-dimensional problems with orders of magnitude fewer evaluations than the standard MAP-Elites, and that, once solved, the produced encoding can be used for rapid optimization of novel, but similar, tasks. The presented techniques not only scale up quality diversity algorithms to high dimensions, but show that black-box optimization encodings can be automatically learned, rather than hand designed.
Several approaches have been developed to answer specific questions that a user may have about an AI system that can plan and act. However, the problems of identifying which questions to ask and that of computing a user-interpretable symbolic description of the overall capabilities of the system have remained largely unaddressed. This paper presents an approach for addressing these problems by learning user-interpretable symbolic descriptions of the limits and capabilities of a black-box AI system using low-level simulators. It uses a hierarchical active querying paradigm to generate questions and to learn a user-interpretable model of the AI system based on its responses. In contrast to prior work, we consider settings where imprecision of the users conceptual vocabulary precludes a direct expression of the agents capabilities. Furthermore, our approach does not require assumptions about the internal design of the target AI system or about the methods that it may use to compute or learn task solutions. Empirical evaluation on several game-based simulator domains shows that this approach can efficiently learn symbolic models of AI systems that use a deterministic black-box policy in fully observable scenarios.
Black box systems for automated decision making, often based on machine learning over (big) data, map a users features into a class or a score without exposing the reasons why. This is problematic not only for lack of transparency, but also for possible biases hidden in the algorithms, due to human prejudices and collection artifacts hidden in the training data, which may lead to unfair or wrong decisions. We introduce the local-to-global framework for black box explanation, a novel approach with promising early results, which paves the road for a wide spectrum of future developments along three dimensions: (i) the language for expressing explanations in terms of highly expressive logic-based rules, with a statistical and causal interpretation; (ii) the inference of local explanations aimed at revealing the logic of the decision adopted for a specific instance by querying and auditing the black box in the vicinity of the target instance; (iii), the bottom-up generalization of the many local explanations into simple global ones, with algorithms that optimize the quality and comprehensibility of explanations.