No Arabic abstract
Learning-based methods are growing prominence for planning purposes. However, there are very few approaches for learning-assisted constrained path-planning on graphs, while there are multiple downstream practical applications. This is the case for constrained path-planning for Autonomous Unmanned Ground Vehicles (AUGV), typically deployed in disaster relief or search and rescue applications. In off-road environments, the AUGV must dynamically optimize a source-destination path under various operational constraints, out of which several are difficult to predict in advance and need to be addressed on-line. We propose a hybrid solving planner that combines machine learning models and an optimal solver. More specifically, a graph convolutional network (GCN) is used to assist a branch and bound (B&B) algorithm in handling the constraints. We conduct experiments on realistic scenarios and show that GCN support enables substantial speedup and smoother scaling to harder problems.
Planning for Autonomous Unmanned Ground Vehicles (AUGV) is still a challenge, especially in difficult, off-road, critical situations. Automatic planning can be used to reach mission objectives, to perform navigation or maneuvers. Most of the time, the problem consists in finding a path from a source to a destination, while satisfying some operational constraints. In a graph without negative cycles, the computation of the single-pair shortest path from a start node to an end node is solved in polynomial time. Additional constraints on the solution path can however make the problem harder to solve. This becomes the case when we need the path to pass through a few mandatory nodes without requiring a specific order of visit. The complexity grows exponentially with the number of mandatory nodes to visit. In this paper, we focus on shortest path search with mandatory nodes on a given connected graph. We propose a hybrid model that combines a constraint-based solver and a graph convolutional neural network to improve search performance. Promising results are obtained on realistic scenarios.
Learning-based methods are increasingly popular for search algorithms in single-criterion optimization problems. In contrast, for multiple-criteria optimization there are significantly fewer approaches despite the existence of numerous applications. Constrained path-planning for Autonomous Ground Vehicles (AGV) is one such application, where an AGV is typically deployed in disaster relief or search and rescue applications in off-road environments. The agent can be faced with the following dilemma : optimize a source-destination path according to a known criterion and an uncertain criterion under operational constraints. The known criterion is associated to the cost of the path, representing the distance. The uncertain criterion represents the feasibility of driving through the path without requiring human intervention. It depends on various external parameters such as the physics of the vehicle, the state of the explored terrains or weather conditions. In this work, we leverage knowledge acquired through offline simulations by training a neural network model to predict the uncertain criterion. We integrate this model inside a path-planner which can solve problems online. Finally, we conduct experiments on realistic AGV scenarios which illustrate that the proposed framework requires human intervention less frequently, trading for a limited increase in the path distance.
Scheduling in the presence of uncertainty is an area of interest in artificial intelligence due to the large number of applications. We study the problem of dynamic controllability (DC) of disjunctive temporal networks with uncertainty (DTNU), which seeks a strategy to satisfy all constraints in response to uncontrollable action durations. We introduce a more restricted, stronger form of controllability than DC for DTNUs, time-based dynamic controllability (TDC), and present a tree search approach to determine whether or not a DTNU is TDC. Moreover, we leverage the learning capability of a message passing neural network (MPNN) as a heuristic for tree search guidance. Finally, we conduct experiments for which the tree search shows superior results to state-of-the-art timed-game automata (TGA) based approaches. We observe that using an MPNN for tree search guidance leads to a significant increase in solving performance and scalability to harder DTNU problems.
Path planning, the problem of efficiently discovering high-reward trajectories, often requires optimizing a high-dimensional and multimodal reward function. Popular approaches like CEM and CMA-ES greedily focus on promising regions of the search space and may get trapped in local maxima. DOO and VOOT balance exploration and exploitation, but use space partitioning strategies independent of the reward function to be optimized. Recently, LaMCTS empirically learns to partition the search space in a reward-sensitive manner for black-box optimization. In this paper, we develop a novel formal regret analysis for when and why such an adaptive region partitioning scheme works. We also propose a new path planning method PlaLaM which improves the function value estimation within each sub-region, and uses a latent representation of the search space. Empirically, PlaLaM outperforms existing path planning methods in 2D navigation tasks, especially in the presence of difficult-to-escape local optima, and shows benefits when plugged into model-based RL with planning components such as PETS. These gains transfer to highly multimodal real-world tasks, where we outperform strong baselines in compiler phase ordering by up to 245% and in molecular design by up to 0.4 on properties on a 0-1 scale. Code is available at https://github.com/yangkevin2/plalam.
Data integration has been studied extensively for decades and approached from different angles. However, this domain still remains largely rule-driven and lacks universal automation. Recent developments in machine learning and in particular deep learning have opened the way to more general and efficient solutions to data-integration tasks. In this paper, we demonstrate an approach that allows modeling and integrating entities by leveraging their relations and contextual information. This is achieved by combining siamese and graph neural networks to effectively propagate information between connected entities and support high scalability. We evaluated our approach on the task of integrating data about business entities, demonstrating that it outperforms both traditional rule-based systems and other deep learning approaches.