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We propose an approach to learn an extensional representation of a discrete deterministic planning domain from observations in a continuous space navigated by the agent actions. This is achieved through the use of a perception function providing the likelihood of a real-value observation being in a given state of the planning domain after executing an action. The agent learns an extensional representation of the domain (the set of states, the transitions from states to states caused by actions) and the perception function on-line, while it acts for accomplishing its task. In order to provide a practical approach that can scale up to large state spaces, a â€œdraftâ€ intensional (PDDL-based) model of the planning domain is used to guide the exploration of the environment and learn the states and state transitions. The proposed approach uses a novel algorithm to (i) construct the extensional representation of the domain by interleaving symbolic planning in the PDDL intensional representation and search in the state transition graph of the extensional representation; (ii) incrementally refine the intensional representation taking into account information about the actions that the agent cannot execute. An experimental analysis shows that the novel approach can scale up to large state spaces, thus overcoming the limits in scalability of the previous work.

AAAI 2021

On-Line Learning of Planning Domains from Sensor Data in PAL: Scaling up to Large State Spaces

We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

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AAAI 2026

We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

technical paper

The purpose of the AAAI conference is to promote research in artificial intelligence (AI) and scientific exchange among AI researchers, practitioners, scientists, and engineers in affiliated disciplines. 

The optimal camera placement problem (OCP) aims to accomplish surveillance tasks with the minimum number of cameras, which is one of the topics in the GECCO 2020 Competition and can be modeled as the unicost set covering problem (USCP). This paper presents a weighting-based variable neighborhood search (WVNS) algorithm for solving OCP. First, it simplifies the problem instances with four reduction rules based on dominance and independence. Then, WVNS converts the simplified OCP into a series of decision unicost set covering subproblems and tackles them with a fast local search procedure featured by a swap-based neighborhood structure. WVNS employs an efficient incremental evaluation technique and further boosts the neighborhood evaluation by exploiting the dominance and independence features among neighborhood moves. Computational experiments on the 69 benchmark instances introduced in the GECCO 2020 Competition on OCP and USCP show that WVNS is extremely competitive comparing to the state-of-the-art methods. It outperforms or matches several best performing competitors on all instances in both the OCP and USCP tracks of the competition, and its advantage on 15 large-scale instances are over 10%. In addition, WVNS improves the previous best known results for 12 classical benchmark instances in the literature.

Weighting-Based Variable Neighborhood Search for Optimal Camera Placement

Gradient-based adversarial training is widely used in improving the robustness of neural networks, while it cannot be easily adapted to natural language processing tasks since the embedding space is discrete.
In natural language processing fields, virtual adversarial training is introduced since texts are discrete and cannot be perturbed by gradients directly. 
Alternatively, virtual adversarial training, which generates perturbations on the embedding space, is introduced in NLP tasks.
Despite its success, existing virtual adversarial training methods generate perturbations roughly constrained by Frobenius normalization balls.
To craft fine-grained perturbations, we propose a Token-Aware Virtual Adversarial Training method.
We introduce a token-level accumulated perturbation vocabulary to initialize the perturbations better and use a token-level normalization ball to constrain these perturbations pertinently.
Experiments show that our method improves the performance of pre-trained models such as BERT and ALBERT in various tasks by a considerable margin.
The proposed method improves the score of the GLUE benchmark from 78.3 to 80.9 using BERT model and it also enhances the performance of sequence labeling and text classification tasks.

Token-Aware Virtual Adversarial Training in Natural Language Understanding

This paper presents an information-theoretic framework for unifying active learning problems: level set estimation (LSE), Bayesian optimization (BO), and their generalized variant. We first introduce a novel active learning criterion that subsumes an existing LSE algorithm and achieves state-of-the-art performance in LSE problems with a continuous input domain. Then, by exploiting the relationship between LSE and BO, we design a competitive information-theoretic acquisition function for BO that has interesting connections to upper confidence bound and max-value entropy search (MES). The latter connection reveals a drawback of MES which has important implications on not only MES but also on other MES-based acquisition functions. Finally, our unifying information-theoretic framework can be applied to solve a generalized problem of LSE and BO involving multiple level sets in a data-efficient manner. We empirically evaluate the performance of our proposed algorithms using synthetic benchmark functions, a real-world dataset, and in hyperparameter tuning of machine learning models.

An Information-Theoretic Framework for Unifying Active Learning Problems

We show that Neural ODEs, an emerging class of time-continuous neural networks, can be verified by solving a set of global-optimization problems. For this purpose, we introduce Stochastic Lagrangian Reachability (SLR), an abstraction-based technique for constructing a tight Reachtube (an over-approximation of the set of reachable states over a given time-horizon), and provide stochastic guarantees in the form of confidence intervals for the Reachtube bounds.
SLR inherently avoids the infamous wrapping effect (accumulation of over-approximation errors) by performing local optimization steps to expand safe regions instead of repeatedly forward-propagating them as is done by deterministic reachability methods.
To enable fast local optimizations, we introduce a novel forward-mode adjoint sensitivity method to compute gradients without the need for backpropagation.
Finally, we establish asymptotic and non-asymptotic convergence rates for SLR.

On the Verification of Neural ODEs with Stochastic Guarantees

The parameters for a Markov Decision Process (MDP) often cannot be specified exactly. Uncertain MDPs (UMDPs) capture this model ambiguity by defining sets which the parameters belong to. Minimax regret has been proposed as an
objective for planning in UMDPs to find robust policies which are not overly conservative. In this work, we focus on planning for Stochastic Shortest Path (SSP) UMDPs with uncertain cost and transition functions. We introduce a Bellman equation to compute the regret for a policy. We propose a dynamic programming algorithm that utilises the regret Bellman equation, and show that it optimises minimax regret exactly for UMDPs with independent uncertainties. For coupled uncertainties, we extend our approach to use options to enable a trade off between computation and solution quality. We evaluate our approach on both synthetic and real-world domains, showing that it significantly outperforms existing baselines.

Minimax Regret Optimisation for Robust Planning in Uncertain Markov Decision Processes

Width-based planning methods have been shown to yield state-of-the-art performance in the Atari 2600 domain using pixel input. One successful approach, RolloutIW, represents states with the B-PROST boolean feature set. An augmented version of RolloutIW, pi-IW, shows that learned features can be competitive with handcrafted ones for width-based search. In this paper, we leverage variational autoencoders (VAEs) to learn features directly from pixels in a principled manner, and without supervision. The inference model of the trained VAEs extracts boolean features from pixels, and RolloutIW plans with these features. The resulting combination outperforms the original RolloutIW and human professional play on Atari 2600 and drastically reduces the size of the feature set.

Planning from Pixels in Atari with Learned Symbolic Representations

Knowledge Graphs (KGs) can be used to store information about software design, biomedical designs, and financial information---all domains where intellectual property and/or specialized knowledge must be kept confidential. Moreover, KGs can also be used to represent the content of technical documents. In order to deter theft of intellectual property via cyber-attacks, we consider the following problem: given a KG K0 (e.g., representing a software or biomedical device design or the content of a technical document), can we automatically generate a set of KGs that are similar enough to K0 (so they are hard to discern as synthetic) but sufficiently different (so as to be wrong)? If this is possible, then we will be one step closer to automatically generating fake KGs that an adversary has difficulty distinguishing from the original. We will also be closer to automatically generating documents corresponding to fake KGs so that an adversary who steals such documents has difficulty distinguishing the real from the fakes. We formally define this problem and prove that it is NP-hard. We show that obvious approaches to solving this problem do not satisfy a novel concept of "adversary-awareness" that we define. We provide a graph-theoretic characterization of the problem and leverage it to devise an "adversary-aware" algorithm. We validate the efficacy of our algorithm on 3 diverse real-world datasets, showing that it achieves high levels of deception.

Randomized Generation of Adversary-Aware Fake Knowledge Graphs to Combat Intellectual Property Theft

Knowledge distillation has demonstrated encouraging performances in deep model compression. Most existing approaches, however, require massive labeled data to accomplish the knowledge transfer,  making the model compression a cumbersome and costly process. In this paper, we investigate the practical few-shot knowledge distillation scenario, where we assume only a few samples without human annotations are available for each category. To this end, we introduce a principled dual-stage distillation scheme tailored for few-shot data. In the first step, we graft the student blocks one by one onto the teacher, and learn the parameters of the grafted block intertwined with those of the other teacher blocks. In the second step, the trained student blocks are progressively connected and then together grafted onto the teacher network, allowing the learned student blocks to adapt themselves to each other and eventually replace the teacher network. Experiments demonstrate that our approach, with only a few unlabeled samples, achieves gratifying results on CIFAR10,CIFAR100, and ILSVRC-2012. On CIFAR10 and CIFAR100, our performances are even on par with those of knowledge distillation schemes that utilize the full datasets. The source code is available at https://github.com/zju-vipa/NetGraft.

Progressive Network Grafting for Few-Shot Knowledge Distillation

Recent findings suggest that humans deploy cognitive mechanism of physics simulation engines to simulate the physics of objects. We propose a framework for bots to deploy probabilistic programming tools for interacting with intuitive physics environments. The framework employs a physics simulation in a probabilistic way to infer about moves performed by an agent in a setting governed by Newtonian laws of motion. However, methods of probabilistic programs can be slow in such setting due to their need to generate many samples. We complement the model with a model-free approach to aid the sampling procedures in becoming more efficient through learning from experience during game playing. We present an approach where combining model-free approaches (a convolutional neural network in our model) and model-based approaches (probabilistic physics simulation) is able to achieve what neither could alone. This way the model outperforms an all model-free or all model-based approach. We discuss a case study showing empirical results of the performance of the model on the game of Flappy Bird.

Probabilistic Programming Bots in Intuitive Physics Game Play

Existing speech to speech translation systems heavily rely on the text of target language: they usually translate source language either to target text and then synthesize target speech from text, or directly to target speech with target text for auxiliary training. However, those methods cannot be applied to unwritten target languages, which have no written text or phoneme available. In this paper, we develop a translation system for unwritten languages, named as UWSpeech, which converts target unwritten speech into discrete tokens with a converter, and then translates source-language speech into target discrete tokens with a translator, and finally synthesizes target speech from target discrete tokens with an inverter. We propose a method called XL-VAE, which enhances vector quantized variational autoencoder (VQ-VAE) with cross-lingual (XL) speech recognition, to train the converter and inverter of UWSpeech jointly. Experiments on Fisher Spanish-English conversation translation dataset show that UWSpeech outperforms direct translation and VQ-VAE baseline by about 16 and 10 BLEU points respectively, which demonstrate the advantages and potentials of UWSpeech.

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