Efficient Black-Box Planning Using Macro-Actions with Focused Effects

Efficient Black-Box Planning Using Macro-Actions with Focused Effects

Cameron Allen, Michael Katz, Tim Klinger, George Konidaris, Matthew Riemer, Gerald Tesauro

Proceedings of the Thirtieth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 4024-4031. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2021/554

The difficulty of deterministic planning increases exponentially with search-tree depth. Black-box planning presents an even greater challenge, since planners must operate without an explicit model of the domain. Heuristics can make search more efficient, but goal-aware heuristics for black-box planning usually rely on goal counting, which is often quite uninformative. In this work, we show how to overcome this limitation by discovering macro-actions that make the goal-count heuristic more accurate. Our approach searches for macro-actions with focused effects (i.e. macros that modify only a small number of state variables), which align well with the assumptions made by the goal-count heuristic. Focused macros dramatically improve black-box planning efficiency across a wide range of planning domains, sometimes beating even state-of-the-art planners with access to a full domain model.
Keywords:
Planning and Scheduling: Planning and Scheduling
Planning and Scheduling: Search in Planning and Scheduling
Heuristic Search and Game Playing: Heuristic Search