Plansformer Tool: Demonstrating Generation of Symbolic Plans Using Transformers

Plansformer Tool: Demonstrating Generation of Symbolic Plans Using Transformers

Vishal Pallagani, Bharath Muppasani, Biplav Srivastava, Francesca Rossi, Lior Horesh, Keerthiram Murugesan, Andrea Loreggia, Francesco Fabiano, Rony Joseph, Yathin Kethepalli

Proceedings of the Thirty-Second International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Demo Track. Pages 7158-7162. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2023/839

Plansformer is a novel tool that utilizes a fine-tuned language model based on transformer architecture to generate symbolic plans. Transformers are a type of neural network architecture that have been shown to be highly effective in a range of natural language processing tasks. Unlike traditional planning systems that use heuristic-based search strategies, Plansformer is fine-tuned on specific classical planning domains to generate high-quality plans that are both fluent and feasible. Plansformer takes the domain and problem files as input (in PDDL) and outputs a sequence of actions that can be executed to solve the problem. We demonstrate the effectiveness of Plansformer on a variety of benchmark problems and provide both qualitative and quantitative results obtained during our evaluation, including its limitations. Plansformer has the potential to significantly improve the efficiency and effectiveness of planning in various domains, from logistics and scheduling to natural language processing and human-computer interaction. In addition, we provide public access to Plansformer via a website as well as an API endpoint; this enables other researchers to utilize our tool for planning and execution. The demo video is available at https://youtu.be/_1rlctCGsrk
Keywords:
Planning and Scheduling: PS: Learning in planning and scheduling
Natural Language Processing: NLP: Language generation