A Domain-Independent Agent Architecture for Adaptive Operation in Evolving Open Worlds

Model-based reasoning agents are ill-equipped to act in novel situations in which their model of the environment no longer sufficiently represents the world. We propose HYDRA - a framework for designing model-based agents operating in mixed discrete-continuous worlds, that can autonomously detect when the environment has evolved from its canonical setup, understand how it has evolved, and adapt the agents' models to perform effectively. HYDRA is based upon PDDL+, a rich modeling language for planning in mixed, discrete-continuous environments. It augments the planning module with visual reasoning, task selection, and action execution modules for closed-loop interaction with complex environments. HYDRA implements a novel meta-reasoning process that enables the agent to monitor its own behavior from a variety of aspects. The process employs a diverse set of computational methods to maintain expectations about the agent's own behavior in an environment. Divergences from those expectations are useful in detecting when the environment has evolved and identifying opportunities to adapt the underlying models. HYDRA builds upon ideas from diagnosis and repair and uses a heuristics-guided search over model changes such that they become competent in novel conditions. The HYDRA framework has been used to implement novelty-aware agents for three diverse domains - CartPole++ (a higher dimension variant of a classic control problem), Science Birds (an IJCAI competition problem), and PogoStick (a specific problem domain in Minecraft). We report empirical observations from these domains to demonstrate the efficacy of various components in the novelty meta-reasoning process.

Learning to Operate in Open Worlds by Adapting Planning Models

Planning agents are ill-equipped to act in novel situations in which their domain model no longer accurately represents the world. We introduce an approach for such agents operating in open worlds that detects the presence of novelties and effectively adapts their domain models and consequent action selection. It uses observations of action execution and measures their divergence from what is expected, according to the environment model, to infer existence of a novelty. Then, it revises the model through a heuristics-guided search over model changes. We report empirical evaluations on the CartPole problem, a standard Reinforcement Learning (RL) benchmark. The results show that our approach can deal with a class of novelties very quickly and in an interpretable fashion.

Playing Angry Birds with a Domain-Independent PDDL+ Planner

This demo paper presents the first system for playing the popular Angry Birds game using a domain-independent planner. Our system models Angry Birds levels using PDDL+, a planning language for mixed discrete/continuous domains. It uses a domain-independent PDDL+ planner to generate plans and executes them. In this demo paper, we present the system's PDDL+ model for this domain, identify key design decisions that reduce the problem complexity, and compare the performance of our system to model-specific methods for this domain. The results show that our system's performance is on par with other domain-specific systems for Angry Birds, suggesting the applicability of domain-independent planning to this benchmark AI challenge.