Aachen Symposium


on Representation
Learning to Act and Plan

Vaals,

Sept.
16th – 18th, 2024

 Welcome

Welcome to the 2024 Aachen Symposium on Representation Learning to Act and Plan at Hotel Kasteel Bloemendal in Vaals.

Glad you’re here!

 Aachen by bus

To visit Aachen, you can take the bus 350 for a 25-minute ride.
It leaves from Vaals, Sint Jozefplein, 200 meters from the venue,
and arrives at Aachen, Elisenbrunnen, right in the city center.
Buy tickets from the bus driver or through the Naveo app.

Vaals,

Sint Jozefplein

Aachen,

Elisenbrunnen

 350

9 AM

10 AM

11 AM

Noon

1 PM

2 PM

3 PM

4 PM

5 PM

6 PM

7 PM

8 PM

9 PM

10 PM

Monday, Sept. 16th

Opening and welcome

8:45 AM

1.1 • General AI 1

George Konidaris

Sheila McIlraith

Blai Bonet

Coffee break

1.2 • Planning 1

Miguel Lázaro-Gredilla

Aske Plaat

Aviv Tamar

Q&A + Discussion

Lunch

1.3 • Reinforcement Learning 1

Forest Agostinelli

Anders Jonsson

Dennis Soemers

Coffee break

1.4 • Robotics

Siddharth Srivastava

Beomjoon Kim

Marc Toussaint

Violin duet

Oleksandr Yukhymovych

Irina Trajkovska

Dinner

Tuesday, Sept. 17th

2.1 • Reinforcement Learning 2

Vincent François-Lavet

Herke van Hoof

Matthew E. Taylor

Coffee break

2.2 • General AI 2

Benjamin Rosman

Alfonso Emilio Gerevini

Scott Sanner

Q&A + Discussion

Lunch

2.3 • Synthesis

Levi Lelis

Sebastijan Dumancic

Giuseppe De Giacomo

Coffee break

Aachen tour

Free time in Aachen

Bus back to hotel

Dinner

Wednesday, Sept. 18th

3.1 • Planning 2

Sylvie Thiébaux

Dominik Drexler

Charles Gretton

Coffee break

3.2 • Planning and Execution

Erez Karpas

Luciano Serafini

Vicenç Gómez

Q&A + Discussion

Lunch

3.3 • Generalized Planning

Simon Ståhlberg

Gustav Šír

Dillon Ze Chen

Coffee + Discussion

End

Forest Agostinelli

University of South Carolina

Assistant professor at USC. He focuses on AI for planning problems, solution explanation, and knowledge discovery using deep learning, reinforcement learning, and heuristic search.

The Intersection of Deep Reinforcement Learning, Heuristic Search, and Formal Logic

Blai Bonet

Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Retired professor from Universidad Simón Bolívar and researcher at UPF. He researches decision-theoretic planning, heuristic search, reinforcement learning, and graphical models.

Learning Models, Policies, and Sketches: Progress and Challenges

Dillon Ze Chen

LAAS-CNRS

PhD student at LAAS-CNRS, supervised by Sylvie Thiébaux. His research spans machine learning and planning, heuristics, graph neural networks, and nondeterministic planning.

Learning Heuristics for Symbolic Planning

Giuseppe De Giacomo

University of Oxford

Professor at the University of Oxford. His research spans knowledge representation, reasoning about actions, planning, autonomous agents, and data management.

Formal and Efficient Control Synthesis Over Infinite Traces: From LTLf and PPLTL to LTL+ and PPLTL+

Dominik Drexler

Linköping University

PhD student at LiU. His research focuses on integrating learning with automated planning, particularly learning reusable control knowledge for goal-oriented action sequences.

Equivalence-Based Abstractions for Generalized Planning

Sebastijan Dumancic

Delft University of Technology

Assistant professor at TU Delft. He researches program synthesis and probabilistic programming for minimal data learning, applied to scientific discovery, robotics, and planning.

Lessons About Representations From Program Synthesis, and Some Thoughts on Gen. Planning

Vincent François-Lavet

Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Assistant professor at VU Amsterdam. He researches deep and reinforcement learning, focusing on representation learning for agents that generalize from limited data.

Representation Learning for Generalization, Exploration and Interpretable Decision-Making

Alfonso Emilio Gerevini

University of Brescia

Professor at UniBS. He researches issues of automated planning, knowledge representation and reasoning, machine learning and data mining.

Neuro-Symbolic Approaches to Generalized Planning and Goal Recognition

Vicenç Gómez

Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Associate professor at UPF. His interests include machine learning, approximate inference, and optimal control, applied to social networks, robotics, and brain-computer interfaces.

Improving Subgraph-GNNs via Edge-Level Ego-Network Encodings

Charles Gretton

Australian National University

Associate professor at ANU. His research covers automated planning, reasoning, and machine learning, with applications in security, retail optimization, and robotics.

Exposing Problem Structures and Regularities in AI Planning

Anders Jonsson

Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Full professor at UPF. His research focuses on automated planning, reinforcement learning, multi-agent systems, and the computational complexity of these problems.

Representation Learning for Reinforcement Learning

Erez Karpas

Technion

Associate professor at Technion. He specializes in artificial intelligence and robotics, including autonomous decision support systems and planning.

Combining Search and Learning for Planning (and Execution)

Beomjoon Kim

KAIST

Assistant professor at KAIST. His research focuses on developing general-purpose mobile manipulation robots that can efficiently make decisions in complex environments.

Object Representation for Contact-Rich Manipulation

George Konidaris

Brown University

Associate professor at Brown and director of the intelligent robot lab. He researches general-purpose robots and learning abstraction hierarchies for efficient planning.

General AI via Learned Abstract Representations

Miguel Lázaro-Gredilla

Google DeepMind

Researcher at Google DeepMind. He is interested in learning representation, schemas, and cognitive maps, planning, and variational inference in ML and cognitive neuroscience.

What Type of Inference Is Planning?

Levi Lelis

University of Alberta

Assistant professor at the U of A. He develops algorithms for combinatorial search, focusing on programmatic representations for sequential decision-making.

Learning Programs Through Neural Decomposition

Sheila McIlraith

University of Toronto

Professor at the U of T. Her research encompasses sequential decision-making, human-compatible AI, commonsense reasoning, and safety constraints in AI.

The Signal-Symbol Nexus for Sequential Decision Making: Where KR and Planning Meet ML

Aske Plaat

Leiden University

Professor at Leiden University. He leads the sustainable energy learning lab and the reinforcement learning group, focusing on artificial intelligence.

Planning, but Not As We Know It

Benjamin Rosman

University of the Witwatersrand

Professor at Wits University. He researches reinforcement learning and decision-making in autonomous systems, focusing on knowledge abstraction and generalization.

Behaviour Composition in RL

Scott Sanner

University of Toronto

Professor at the U of T. His research spans machine learning, AI, and operations research, with applications in conversational systems, Smart Cities, and predictive analytics.

Open World Planning for Embodied AI

Luciano Serafini

Fondazione Bruno Kessler

Head of the data and knowledge management research unit at FBK. He researches multi-context systems, semantic matching, and integrating machine learning and logical reasoning.

Agents That Plan and Act to Learn in Open-ended Environments

Gustav Šír

Czech Technical University

Assistant professor at CTU, specializing in relational machine learning. His research involves integrating relational logic with deep learning on data with complex dependencies.

Learning to Plan With Graph and Relational Neural Networks

Dennis Soemers

Maastricht University

Assistant professor at UM. His research focuses on reinforcement learning, search algorithms, and AI in games, with additional interests in game description languages.

Generalisation in RL via Environment Descriptions

Siddharth Srivastava

Arizona State University

Associate professor at ASU. He researches generalizable planning and learning in AI and robotics, with an emphasis on AI system assessment, safety, and transfer learning.

From Reals to Logic: Learning Logic and Hierarchies for Reliable Robot Planning

Simon Ståhlberg

RWTH Aachen University

Postdoc at RWTH, previously principal research engineer at Linköping University. His research focuses on using neural networks to learn generalized policies for classical planning.

Expressive Requirements for Learning General Policies

Aviv Tamar

Technion

Associate professor at Technion and head of the robot learning lab. He studies AI and machine learning for robotics, focusing on reinforcement learning and environment modeling.

A Bayesian Approach to Online Planning

Matthew E. Taylor

University of Alberta

Associate professor at the U of A. He focuses on fundamental and applied problems in reinforcement learning, human-in-the-loop AI, multi-agent systems, and robotics.

Human in the Loop Reinforcement Learning

Sylvie Thiébaux

Australian National University

Professor at ANU and a researcher at the University of Toulouse. She specializes in automated planning, scheduling, and optimization, with applications in energy and transport.

Learning for Planning: Learning Lifted PDDL and Heuristics

Marc Toussaint

Technische Universität Berlin

Professor at TU Berlin. His research integrates machine learning and optimization in robotics, addressing physical reasoning, task-and-motion planning, and adaptive behavior.

Formalizing the Problem of Physical Reasoning & Manipulation

Paolo Traverso

Fondazione Bruno Kessler

Director of strategic planning at FBK. His interests span AI and automated planning, software services, and automated verification and synthesis of software systems.

Herke van Hoof

University of Amsterdam

Assistant professor at UvA. He focuses on reinforcement learning with structured data and prior knowledge, aiming to improve data efficiency for combinatorial optimization.

Learning Policy Building Blocks and Observation Representations for Planning