# Scaling up ML-based Black-box Planning with Partial STRIPS Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.04479 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.04479/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 48 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Jul 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [A Brief Survey of Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.05866/) (2017)
- [Safe Reinforcement Learning via Shielding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.08611/) (2017)
- [PICARD: Parsing Incrementally for Constrained Auto-Regressive Decoding from Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05093/) (2021)
- [Reward Machines: Exploiting Reward Function Structure in Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.03950/) (2020)
- [Foundations for Restraining Bolts: Reinforcement Learning with LTLf/LDLf restraining specifications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06333/) (2018)
- [Learning Domain-Independent Planning Heuristics with Hypergraph Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.13101/) (2019)
- [Generalized Planning With Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.02305/) (2020)
- [Learning Generalized Relational Heuristic Networks for Model-Agnostic Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.06702/) (2020)
- [Exploiting Learned Policies in Focal Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10535/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

A popular approach for sequential decision-making is to perform simulator-based search guided with Machine Learning (ML) methods like policy learning. On the other hand, model-relaxation heuristics can guide the search effectively if a full declarative model is available. In this work, we consider how a practitioner can improve ML-based black-box planning on settings where a complete symbolic model is not available. We show that specifying an incomplete STRIPS model that describes only part of the problem enables the use of relaxation heuristics. Our findings on several planning domains suggest that this is an effective way to improve ML-based black-box planning beyond collecting more data or tuning ML architectures.