Task Scoping: Generating Task-Specific Abstractions for Planning in Open-Scope Models

TL;DR

The paper introduces task scoping, a method to automatically reduce the complexity of open-scope planning models by removing irrelevant variables and actions, significantly improving planning efficiency across diverse domains.

Contribution

It presents a novel task scoping technique that leverages causal analysis and reachability to efficiently simplify planning models for open-scope environments.

Findings

Achieves up to 75x reduction in search time in Minecraft domain.

Effectively shrinks search space by orders of magnitude.

Demonstrates broad applicability across multiple open-scope domains.

Abstract

A general-purpose planning agent requires an open-scope world model: one rich enough to tackle any of the wide range of tasks it may be asked to solve over its operational lifetime. This stands in contrast with typical planning approaches, where the scope of a model is limited to a specific family of tasks that share significant structure. Unfortunately, planning to solve any specific task using an open-scope model is computationally intractable - even for state-of-the-art methods - due to the many states and actions that are necessarily present in the model but irrelevant to that problem. We propose task scoping: a method that exploits knowledge of the initial state, goal conditions, and transition system to automatically and efficiently remove provably irrelevant variables and actions from a planning problem. Our approach leverages causal link analysis and backwards reachability over state variables (rather than states) along with operator merging (when effects on relevant variables are identical). Using task scoping as a pre-planning step can shrink the search space by orders of magnitude and dramatically decrease planning time. We empirically demonstrate that these improvements occur across a variety of open-scope domains, including Minecraft, where our approach leads to a 75x reduction in search time with a state-of-the-art numeric planner, even after including the time required for task scoping itself.