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Regression Planning Networks (arxiv.org)
4 points by sel1 on Oct 2, 2019 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: A network plans backward from the final goal, laying down smaller goals back to what it sees, so it can handle long tasks from images without hand-written rules. In a grid world and a simulated 3D kitchen it reached near-optimal results on new tasks.

Abstract

Recent learning-to-plan methods have shown promising results on planning directly from observation space. Yet, their ability to plan for long-horizon tasks is limited by the accuracy of the prediction model. On the other hand, classical symbolic planners show remarkable capabilities in solving long-horizon tasks, but they require predefined symbolic rules and symbolic states, restricting their real-world applicability. In this work, we combine the benefits of these two paradigms and propose a learning-to-plan method that can directly generate a long-term symbolic plan conditioned on high-dimensional observations. We borrow the idea of regression (backward) planning from classical planning literature and introduce Regression Planning Networks (RPN), a neural network architecture that plans backward starting at a task goal and generates a sequence of intermediate goals that reaches the current observation. We show that our model not only inherits many favorable traits from symbolic planning, e.g., the ability to solve previously unseen tasks but also can learn from visual inputs in an end-to-end manner. We evaluate the capabilities of RPN in a grid world environment and a simulated 3D kitchen environment featuring complex visual scenes and long task horizons, and show that it achieves near-optimal performance in completely new task instances.

Danfei Xu, Roberto Martín-Martín, De-An Huang, Yuke Zhu, Silvio Savarese, Li Fei-Fei
arXiv:1909.13072 · cs.AI, cs.CV, cs.LG, cs.RO · submitted Sep 28, 2019
abstract · pdf · html · Accepted at NeurIPS 2019

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