Transferring Learned Control-Knowledge between Planners

Abstract

As any other problem solving task that employs search, AI Planning needs heuristics to efficiently guide the problem-space exploration. Machine learning (ML) provides several techniques for automatically acquiring those heuristics. Usually, a planner solves a problem, and a ML technique generates knowledge from the search episode in terms of complete plans (macro-operators or cases), or heuristics (also named control knowledge in planning). In this paper, we present a novel way of generating planning heuristics: we learn heuristics in one planner and transfer them to another planner. This approach is based on the fact that different planners employ different search bias. We want to extract knowledge from the search performed by one planner and use the learned knowledge on another planner that uses a different search bias. The goal is to improve the efficiency of the second planner by capturing regularities of the domain that it would not capture by itself due to its bias. We employ a deductive learning method (ebl) that is able to automatically acquire control knowledge by generating bounded explanations of the problem-solving episodes in a Graphplan-based planner. Then, we transform the learned knowledge so that it can be used by a bidirectional planner.