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Michael Katz

21 accepted papers

2026

ACPBench Hard: Unrestrained Reasoning about Action, Change, and Planning

ICLR 2026poster

We introduce ACPBench Hard, a dataset of generative, open-ended questions which LLM models needs to answer in order to plan. Models that perform well on these tasks could in principle be integrated into a planner or be used directly as a policy. We discuss the complexity of these tasks as well as th…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Position: Make Planning Research Rigorous Again!

ICML 2026poster

In over sixty years since its inception, the field of planning has made significant contributions to both the theory and practice of building planning software that can solve a never-before-seen planning problem. This was done through established practices of rigorous design and evaluation of planni…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

QueryGym: Step-by-Step Interaction with Relational Databases

AAAI 2026technical

We introduce QueryGym, an interactive environment for building, testing, and evaluating LLM-based query planning agents. Existing frameworks often tie agents to specific query language dialects or obscure their reasoning; QueryGym instead requires agents to construct explicit sequences of relational

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

ACPBench: Reasoning About Action, Change, and Planning

AAAI 2025technical

There is an increasing body of work using Large Language Models (LLMs) as agents for orchestrating workflows and making decisions in domains that require planning and multistep reasoning. As a result, it is imperative to evaluate LLMs on core skills required for planning. In this work, we present AC…

2025

Automating Thought of Search: A Journey Towards Soundness and Completeness (Student Abstract)

AAAI 2025technical

Large language models (LLMs) now turn their attention to search. Recently, Thought of Search (ToS) proposed defining the search space with code, having an LLM produce that code. ToS requires a human in the loop, collaboratively producing a sound successor function and goal test, achieving impressive…

Cited by 5SourcePDFScholar
2024

Can LLMs Fix Issues with Reasoning Models? Towards More Likely Models for AI Planning

AAAI 2024technical

This is the first work to look at the application of large language models (LLMs) for the purpose of model space edits in automated planning tasks. To set the stage for this union, we explore two different flavors of model space problems that have been studied in the AI planning literature and explo…

Cited by 5SourcePDFScholar
2024

Generalized Planning in PDDL Domains with Pretrained Large Language Models

AAAI 2024technical

Recent work has considered whether large language models (LLMs) can function as planners: given a task, generate a plan. We investigate whether LLMs can serve as generalized planners: given a domain and training tasks, generate a program that efficiently produces plans for other tasks in the domain.…

2024

Interactive Plan Selection Using Linear Temporal Logic, Disjunctive Action Landmarks, and Natural Language Instruction

AAAI 2024technical

We present Lemming – a visualization tool for the interactive selection of plans for a given problem, allowing the user to efficiently whittle down the set of plans and select their plan(s) of choice. We demonstrate four different user experiences for this process, three of them based on the princip…

2024

Large Language Models as Planning Domain Generators (Student Abstract)

AAAI 2024technical

The creation of planning models, and in particular domain models, is among the last bastions of tasks that require exten- sive manual labor in AI planning; it is desirable to simplify this process for the sake of making planning more accessi- ble. To this end, we investigate whether large language m…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2024

Partially Observable Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning with AI Planning (Student Abstract)

AAAI 2024technical

Partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) challenge reinforcement learning agents due to incomplete knowledge of the environment. Even assuming monotonicity in uncertainty, it is difficult for an agent to know how and when to stop exploring for a given task. In this abstract, we discus…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

Thought of Search: Planning with Language Models Through The Lens of Efficiency

NeurIPS 2024poster

Among the most important properties of algorithms investigated in computer science are soundness, completeness, and complexity. These properties, however, are rarely analyzed for the vast collection of recently proposed methods for planning with large language models. In this work, we alleviate this…

Cited by 10SourcePDFScholar
2023

Action Space Reduction for Planning Domains

IJCAI 2023poster

Planning tasks succinctly represent labeled transition systems, with each ground action corresponding to a label. This granularity, however, is not necessary for solving planning tasks and can be harmful, especially for model-free methods. In order to apply such methods, the label sets are often man…

2023

Optimistic Exploration in Reinforcement Learning Using Symbolic Model Estimates

NeurIPS 2023poster

There has been an increasing interest in using symbolic models along with reinforcement learning (RL) problems, where these coarser abstract models are used as a way to provide RL agents with higher level guidance. However, most of these works are inherently limited by their assumption of having an…

Cited by 7SourcePDFScholar
2022

A Conflict-Driven Interface Between Symbolic Planning and Nonlinear Constraint Solving

RA-L 2022

Robotic planning in real-world scenarios typically requires joint optimization of logic and continuous variables. A core challenge to combine the strengths of logic planners and continuous solvers is the design of an efficient interface that informs the logical search about continuous infeasibilitie

Cited by 10SourceScholar
2021

Custom-Design of FDR Encodings: The Case of Red-Black Planning

IJCAI 2021poster

Classical planning tasks are commonly described in PDDL, while most planning systems operate on a grounded finite-domain representation (FDR). The translation of PDDL into FDR is complex and has a lot of choice points---it involves identifying so called mutex groups---but most systems rely on the tr…

Cited by 4SourcePDFScholar
2021

Efficient Black-Box Planning Using Macro-Actions with Focused Effects

IJCAI 2021poster

The difficulty of deterministic planning increases exponentially with search-tree depth. Black-box planning presents an even greater challenge, since planners must operate without an explicit model of the domain. Heuristics can make search more efficient, but goal-aware heuristics for black-box plan…