Visit
Thu 11/02
Tom Silver headshot

Visitor Talk: Learning and planning with relational abstractions

Decision-making in robotics domains is complicated by continuous state and action spaces, long horizons, and sparse feedback. One way to address these challenges is to perform bilevel planning with abstractions, where a high-level search for abstract plans is used to guide planning in the original transition space. In this talk, I will give an overview of our recent efforts [1, 2, 3, 4] to design a bilevel planning system with state and action abstractions that are learned from data. I will also make the case for learning abstractions that are compatible with highly optimized PDDL planners, while arguing that PDDL planning should be only one component of a larger integrated planning system.

Speaker Bio

Tom Silver is a final year PhD student at MIT EECS advised by Leslie Kaelbling and Josh Tenenbaum. His research is at the intersection of machine learning and planning with applications to robotics, and often uses techniques from task and motion planning, program synthesis, and reinforcement learning. Before graduate school, he was a researcher at Vicarious AI and received his B.A. from Harvard in computer science and mathematics in 2016. His work is supported by an NSF fellowship and an MIT presidential fellowship.