Deep Learning for Generalised Planning with Background Knowledge

Automated planning is a form of declarative problem solving which has recently drawn attention from the machine learning (ML) community. ML has been applied to planning either as a way to test `reasoning capabilities' of architectures, or more pragmatically in an attempt to scale up solvers with learned domain knowledge. In practice, planning problems are easy to solve but hard to optimise. However, ML approaches still struggle to solve many problems that are often easy for both humans and classical planners. In this paper, we thus propose a new ML approach that allows users to specify background knowledge (BK) through Datalog rules to guide both the learning and planning processes in an integrated fashion. By incorporating BK, our approach bypasses the need to relearn how to solve problems from scratch and instead focuses the learning on plan quality optimisation. Experiments with BK demonstrate that our method successfully scales and learns to plan efficiently with high quality solutions from small training data generated in under 5 seconds.