Previous planning competitions have
all been structured around a number
of planning domains such as Logistics, Freecell, and Airport, with each
planner being asked to solve a sequence of problems from each domain.
Previous (non-learning) planners in the competitions do not attempt to
leverage this structure, for example, by trying to learn from previous
problems in a domain to solve future problems in the domain more
effectively. The motivation for the learning track is to encourage work
on planning systems that do have such learning capabilities.
The general structure of the learning
track will be as follows. Competitors will submit two programs to the
organizers before the competition begins: a learner and a planner. The
competition will then be run in two stages. First, there will be a
learning stage, where the learning programs will be provided with the
domain definition and example problems for each domain that will appear
in the competition. For each domain, the learning program will be given
a certain amount of learning time, after which it must output a
domain-specific control-knowledge file. Second, there will be an
evaluation stage, where, for each domain, the planner will be provided
with the appropriate domain-specific control-knowledge file and asked
to solve a sequence of test problems from that domain.
The organizers are not placing any constraints on what style of
learning approach might be used. For example, a system might utilize
statistical/inductive learning or purely deductive learning techniques.
In addition, the learning track provides a good venue for entering
approaches that might not traditionally be viewed as learning,
such as pure domain-analysis. For example, domain analysis could be
conducted during the learning period and the resulting knowledge used
during the evaluation period. Ultimately, we hope to see a wide variety
of approaches, that will help answer the following questions. How can a
planner best use a learning, or domain analysis, period in order to
improve future performance? Preliminary Schedule
(subject to
change)
January 31 '07: Definition of domain
language (some subset
of PDDL) and evaluation schema
February 29 '08: Registration deadline
March 31 '08: Demo problems
June 2
'08:
Final versions of the planners and learners submitted to the
organizers with describing abstracts
July 1
'08:
Deadline for final papers describing competing systems
June-August '08: Collection and evaluation of the
results
September '08: Announcement of the
results
and
winners at
ICAPS'08