Solving Hard AI Planning Instances Using Curriculum-Driven Deep Reinforcement Learning

Solving Hard AI Planning Instances Using Curriculum-Driven Deep Reinforcement Learning

Dieqiao Feng, Carla Gomes, Bart Selman

Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence

Despite significant progress in general AI planning, certain domains remain out of reach of current AI planning systems. Sokoban is a PSPACE-complete planning task and represents one of the hardest domains for current AI planners. Even domain-specific specialized search methods fail quickly due to the exponential search complexity on hard instances. Our approach based on deep reinforcement learning augmented with a curriculum-driven method is the first one to solve hard instances within one day of training while other modern solvers cannot solve these instances within any reasonable time limit. In contrast to prior efforts, which use carefully handcrafted pruning techniques, our approach automatically uncovers domain structure. Our results reveal that deep RL provides a promising framework for solving previously unsolved AI planning problems, provided a proper training curriculum can be devised.
Keywords:
Machine Learning: Deep Reinforcement Learning
Planning and Scheduling: Planning Algorithms
Heuristic Search and Game Playing: Heuristic Search and Machine Learning