On Solving the Rubik's Cube with Domain-Independent Planners Using Standard Representations

Rubik's Cube (RC) is a well-known and computationally challenging puzzle that has motivated AI researchers to explore efficient alternative representations and problem-solving methods. The ideal situation for planning here is that a problem be solved optimally and efficiently represented in a standard notation using a general-purpose solver and heuristics. The fastest solver today for RC is DeepCubeA with a custom representation, and another approach is with Scorpion planner with State-Action-Space+ (SAS+) representation. In this paper, we present the first RC representation in the popular PDDL language so that the domain becomes more accessible to PDDL planners, competitions, and knowledge engineering tools, and is more human-readable. We then bridge across existing approaches and compare performance. We find that in one comparable experiment, DeepCubeA solves all problems with varying complexities, albeit only 18\% are optimal plans. For the same problem set, Scorpion with SAS+ representation and pattern database heuristics solves 61.50\% problems, while FastDownward with PDDL representation and FF heuristic solves 56.50\% problems, out of which all the plans generated were optimal. Our study provides valuable insights into the trade-offs between representational choice and plan optimality that can help researchers design future strategies for challenging domains combining general-purpose solving methods (planning, reinforcement learning), heuristics, and representations (standard or custom).

A Planning Ontology to Represent and Exploit Planning Knowledge for Performance Efficiency

Ontologies are known for their ability to organize rich metadata, support the identification of novel insights via semantic queries, and promote reuse. In this paper, we consider the problem of automated planning, where the objective is to find a sequence of actions that will move an agent from an initial state of the world to a desired goal state. We hypothesize that given a large number of available planners and diverse planning domains; they carry essential information that can be leveraged to identify suitable planners and improve their performance for a domain. We use data on planning domains and planners from the International Planning Competition (IPC) to construct a planning ontology and demonstrate via experiments in two use cases that the ontology can lead to the selection of promising planners and improving their performance using macros - a form of action ordering constraints extracted from planning ontology. We also make the planning ontology and associated resources available to the community to promote further research.

Value-based Fast and Slow AI Nudging

Nudging is a behavioral strategy aimed at influencing people's thoughts and actions. Nudging techniques can be found in many situations in our daily lives, and these nudging techniques can targeted at human fast and unconscious thinking, e.g., by using images to generate fear or the more careful and effortful slow thinking, e.g., by releasing information that makes us reflect on our choices. In this paper, we propose and discuss a value-based AI-human collaborative framework where AI systems nudge humans by proposing decision recommendations. Three different nudging modalities, based on when recommendations are presented to the human, are intended to stimulate human fast thinking, slow thinking, or meta-cognition. Values that are relevant to a specific decision scenario are used to decide when and how to use each of these nudging modalities. Examples of values are decision quality, speed, human upskilling and learning, human agency, and privacy. Several values can be present at the same time, and their priorities can vary over time. The framework treats values as parameters to be instantiated in a specific decision environment.

Can LLMs be Good Financial Advisors?: An Initial Study in Personal Decision Making for Optimized Outcomes

Increasingly powerful Large Language Model (LLM) based chatbots, like ChatGPT and Bard, are becoming available to users that have the potential to revolutionize the quality of decision-making achieved by the public. In this context, we set out to investigate how such systems perform in the personal finance domain, where financial inclusion has been an overarching stated aim of banks for decades. We asked 13 questions representing banking products in personal finance: bank account, credit card, and certificate of deposits and their inter-product interactions, and decisions related to high-value purchases, payment of bank dues, and investment advice, and in different dialects and languages (English, African American Vernacular English, and Telugu). We find that although the outputs of the chatbots are fluent and plausible, there are still critical gaps in providing accurate and reliable financial information using LLM-based chatbots.

Understanding the Capabilities of Large Language Models for Automated Planning

Automated planning is concerned with developing efficient algorithms to generate plans or sequences of actions to achieve a specific goal in a given environment. Emerging Large Language Models (LLMs) can answer questions, write high-quality programming code, and predict protein folding, showcasing their versatility in solving various tasks beyond language-based problems. In this paper, we aim to explore how LLMs can also be used for automated planning. To do so, we seek to answer four key questions. Firstly, we want to understand the extent to which LLMs can be used for plan generation. Secondly, we aim to identify which pre-training data is most effective in facilitating plan generation. Thirdly, we investigate whether fine-tuning or prompting is a more effective approach for plan generation. Finally, we explore whether LLMs are capable of plan generalization. By answering these questions, the study seeks to shed light on the capabilities of LLMs in solving complex planning problems and provide insights into the most effective approaches for using LLMs in this context.

Fast and Slow Planning

The concept of Artificial Intelligence has gained a lot of attention over the last decade. In particular, AI-based tools have been employed in several scenarios and are, by now, pervading our everyday life. Nonetheless, most of these systems lack many capabilities that we would naturally consider to be included in a notion of "intelligence". In this work, we present an architecture that, inspired by the cognitive theory known as Thinking Fast and Slow by D. Kahneman, is tasked with solving planning problems in different settings, specifically: classical and multi-agent epistemic. The system proposed is an instance of a more general AI paradigm, referred to as SOFAI (for Slow and Fast AI). SOFAI exploits multiple solving approaches, with different capabilities that characterize them as either fast or slow, and a metacognitive module to regulate them. This combination of components, which roughly reflects the human reasoning process according to D. Kahneman, allowed us to enhance the reasoning process that, in this case, is concerned with planning in two different settings. The behavior of this system is then compared to state-of-the-art solvers, showing that the newly introduced system presents better results in terms of generality, solving a wider set of problems with an acceptable trade-off between solving times and solution accuracy.

On Safe and Usable Chatbots for Promoting Voter Participation

Chatbots, or bots for short, are multi-modal collaborative assistants that can help people complete useful tasks. Usually, when chatbots are referenced in connection with elections, they often draw negative reactions due to the fear of mis-information and hacking. Instead, in this paper, we explore how chatbots may be used to promote voter participation in vulnerable segments of society like senior citizens and first-time voters. In particular, we build a system that amplifies official information while personalizing it to users' unique needs transparently. We discuss its design, build prototypes with frequently asked questions (FAQ) election information for two US states that are low on an ease-of-voting scale, and report on its initial evaluation in a focus group. Our approach can be a win-win for voters, election agencies trying to fulfill their mandate and democracy at large.

Plansformer: Generating Symbolic Plans using Transformers

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been the subject of active research, significantly advancing the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP). From BERT to BLOOM, LLMs have surpassed state-of-the-art results in various natural language tasks such as question answering, summarization, and text generation. Many ongoing efforts focus on understanding LLMs' capabilities, including their knowledge of the world, syntax, and semantics. However, extending the textual prowess of LLMs to symbolic reasoning has been slow and predominantly focused on tackling problems related to the mathematical field. In this paper, we explore the use of LLMs for automated planning - a branch of AI concerned with the realization of action sequences (plans) to achieve a goal, typically executed by intelligent agents, autonomous robots, and unmanned vehicles. We introduce Plansformer; an LLM fine-tuned on planning problems and capable of generating plans with favorable behavior in terms of correctness and length with reduced knowledge-engineering efforts. We also demonstrate the adaptability of Plansformer in solving different planning domains with varying complexities, owing to the transfer learning abilities of LLMs. For one configuration of Plansformer, we achieve ~97% valid plans, out of which ~95% are optimal for Towers of Hanoi - a puzzle-solving domain.

A Rich Recipe Representation as Plan to Support Expressive Multi Modal Queries on Recipe Content and Preparation Process

Food is not only a basic human necessity but also a key factor driving a society's health and economic well-being. As a result, the cooking domain is a popular use-case to demonstrate decision-support (AI) capabilities in service of benefits like precision health with tools ranging from information retrieval interfaces to task-oriented chatbots. An AI here should understand concepts in the food domain (e.g., recipes, ingredients), be tolerant to failures encountered while cooking (e.g., browning of butter), handle allergy-based substitutions, and work with multiple data modalities (e.g. text and images). However, the recipes today are handled as textual documents which makes it difficult for machines to read, reason and handle ambiguity. This demands a need for better representation of the recipes, overcoming the ambiguity and sparseness that exists in the current textual documents. In this paper, we discuss the construction of a machine-understandable rich recipe representation (R3), in the form of plans, from the recipes available in natural language. R3 is infused with additional knowledge such as information about allergens and images of ingredients, possible failures and tips for each atomic cooking step. To show the benefits of R3, we also present TREAT, a tool for recipe retrieval which uses R3 to perform multi-modal reasoning on the recipe's content (plan objects - ingredients and cooking tools), food preparation process (plan actions and time), and media type (image, text). R3 leads to improved retrieval efficiency and new capabilities that were hither-to not possible in textual representation.