This paper presents a new algorithm for plan recognition called ELEXIR (Engine for LEXicalized Intent Recognition).  ELEXIR represents the plans to be recognized with a grammatical formalism called Combinatory Categorial Grammar(CCG).  We show that representing plans with CCGs can allow us to prevent early commitment to plan goals and thereby reduce runtime.

The following activity recognition problem is considered: a description of the action capabilities of an agent being observed is given. This includes the preconditions and effects of atomic actions and of the activities (sequences of actions) the agent may execute. Given this description and a set of propositions, called history, about action occurrences, intended actions and properties of the world all at various points in time, the problem is to complete the picture as much as possible and determine what has already happened, what the intentions of the agent are, and what may happen as a result of the agent acting on those intentions. We present a framework to solve these activity recognition problems based on a formal language for reasoning about actions that includes a notion of intended actions, and a corresponding formalization in answer set programming.

This paper studies the solving of finite-domain action planning problems with discrete action costs and soft constraints. For sequential optimal planning, a symbolic perimeter database heuristic is addressed in a bucket implementation of A*. For computing net-benefits, we propose symbolic branch-and-bound search together with some search refinements. The net-benefit we optimize is the total benefit of satisfying the goals, minus the total action cost to achieve them. This results in an objective function to be minimized that is a linear expression over the violation of the preferences added to the action cost total.

We call this a topological structure [Dai and Goldsmith, 2007; Over the past few years, point-based POMDP Bonet and Geffner, 2003; Abbad and Boustique, 2003] and solvers scaled up to produce approximate solutions say that a problem has much topological structure when the to mid-sized domains. However, to solve real world problem state space has many layers. These characteristics problems, solvers must exploit the structure of the are embodied in many real-world applications including assembly domain. In this paper we focus on the topological line optimization; network routing; or railway traffic structure of the problem, where the state space control. Consider the assembly of a car that consists in multiple contains layers of states. We present here the Topological steps: first the car moves to the engine installation; then Order Planner (TOP) that utilizes the topological the engine installation crew checks for malfunctions; thereafter structure of the domain to compute belief finishing the engine installation the car moves respectively space trajectories. TOP rapidly produces trajectories to the hood and the wheel stations. Each transition focused on the solveable regions of the belief from a station to another is preceded by a quality measurement space, thus reducing the number of redundant backups procedure that prevents car malfunctions.

Recent progress on external-memory MDP solvers has enabled optimal solutions to large probabilistic planning problems. However, PEMVI requires a human to manually partition the MDP before the planning algorithm can be applied — putting an added burden on the domain designer and detracting from the vision of automated planning.  This paper presents a novel partitioning scheme, which automatically subdivides the state space into blocks that respect the memory constraints. Our algorithm first applies static domain analysis to identify candidates for partitioning, and then uses heuristic search to generate a good partition.  We evaluate the usefulness of our method in the context of PEMVI across many benchmark domains, showing that it can successfully solve extremely large problems in each domain. We also compare the performance of automatic partitioning with previously reported results using human-designed partitions. Experiments show that our algorithm generates significantly superior partitions, which speed MDP solving and also yield vast memory savings.

Most planning problems have strong structures. They can be decomposed into subdomains with causal dependencies. The idea of exploiting the domain decomposition has motivated previous work such as hierarchical planning and factored planing. However, these algorithms require extensive backtracking and lead to few efficient general-purpose planners. On the other hand, heuristic search has been a successful approach to automated planning. The domain decomposition of planning problems, unfortunately, is not directly and fully exploited by heuristic search. We propose a novel and general framework to exploit domain decomposition. Based on a structure analysis on the SAS+ planning formalism, we stratify the sub-domains of a planning problem into dependency layers. By recognizing the stratification of a planning structure, we propose a space reduction method that expands only a subset of executable actions at each state. This reduction method can be combined with state-space search, allowing us to simultaneously employ the strength of domain decomposition and high-quality heuristics. We prove that the reduction preserves completeness and optimality of search and experimentally verify its effectiveness in space reduction.

Traditional AI search methods search in a state space typically modelled as a directed graph. Prohibitively large sizes of state space graphs make complete or optimal search expensive. A key observation, as exemplified by the SAS+ formalism for planning, is that most commonly a state-space graph can be decomposed into subgraphs, linked by constraints. We propose a novel space reduction algorithm that exploits such structure. The result reveals that standard search algorithms may explore many redundant paths. Our method provides an automatic way to remove such redundancy. At each state, we expand only the subgraphs within a dependency closure satisfying certain sufficient conditions instead of all the subgraphs. Theoretically we prove that the proposed algorithm is completeness-preserving as well as optimality-preserving. We show that our reduction method can significantly reduce the search cost on a collection of planning domains.

We explore equivalence relations between states in Markov Decision Processes and Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes. We focus on two different equivalence notions: bisimulation (Givan et al., 2003) and a notion of trace equivalence, under which states are considered equivalent if they generate the same conditional probability distributions over observation sequences (where the conditioning is on action sequences).  We show that the relationship between these two equivalence notions changes depending on the amount and nature of the partial observability. We also present an alternate characterization of bisimulation based on trajectory equivalence.

Planning with temporally extended goals and uncontrollable events has recently been introduced as a formal model for system reconfiguration problems. An important application is to automatically reconfigure a real-life system in such a way that its subsequent internal evolution is consistent with a temporal goal formula. In this paper we introduce an incremental search algorithm and a search-guidance heuristic, two generic planning enhancements. An initial problem is decomposed into a series of subproblems, providing two main ways of speeding up a search. Firstly, a subproblem focuses on a part of the initial goal. Secondly, a notion of action relevance allows to explore with higher priority actions that are heuristically considered to be more relevant to the subproblem at hand. Even though our techniques are more generally applicable, we restrict our attention to planning with temporally extended goals and uncontrollable events. Our ideas are implemented on top of a successful previous system that performs online learning to better guide planning and to safely avoid potentially expensive searches. In experiments, the system speed performance is further improved by a convincing margin.

Point-based algorithms and RTDP-Bel are approximate methods for solving POMDPs that replace the full updates of parallel value iteration by faster and more effective updates at selected beliefs. An important difference between the two methods is that the former adopt  Sondik's representation of the  value function, while the latter uses a tabular representation and a discretization function. The algorithms, however, have not been compared up to now, because  they target different POMDPs: discounted POMDPs on the one hand, and Goal POMDPs on the other. In this paper, we bridge this representational gap, showing how to transform discounted POMDPs into Goal POMDPs, and use the transformation to compare RTDP-Bel with point-based algorithms over the existing discounted benchmarks. The results appear to contradict the conventional wisdom in the area showing that RTDP-Bel is competitive, and sometimes superior to point-based algorithms in both quality and time.