Laura Sebastiá

Javier Segovia-Aguas, Sergio Jiménez, Anders Jonsson et al.

Landmarks are one of the most effective search heuristics for classical planning, but largely ignored in generalized planning. Generalized planning (GP) is usually addressed as a combinatorial search in a given space of algorithmic solutions, where candidate solutions are evaluated w.r.t.~the instances they solve. This type of solution evaluation ignores any sub-goal information that is not explicit in the representation of the planning instances, causing plateaus in the space of candidate generalized plans. Furthermore, node expansion in GP is a run-time bottleneck since it requires evaluating every child node over the entire batch of classical planning instances in a GP problem. In this paper we define a landmark counting heuristic for GP (that considers sub-goal information that is not explicitly represented in the planning instances), and a novel heuristic search algorithm for GP (that we call PGP) and that progressively processes subsets of the planning instances of a GP problem. Our two orthogonal contributions are analyzed in an ablation study, showing that both improve the state-of-the-art in GP as heuristic search, and that both benefit from each other when used in combination.

Cristian Pérez-Corral, Antonio Garrido, Laura Sebastia

Landmarks have long played a pivotal role in automated planning, serving as crucial elements for improving the planning algorithms. The main limitation of classical landmark extraction methods is their sensitivity to specific planning tasks. This results in landmarks fully tailored to individual instances, thereby limiting their applicability across other instances of the same planning domain. We propose a novel approach that learns landmark relationships from multiple planning tasks of a planning domain. This leads to the creation of a \textit{probabilistic lifted ordering graph}, as a structure that captures weighted abstractions of relationships between parameterized landmarks. Although these orderings are not 100\% true (they are probabilistic), they can still be very useful in planning. Next, given a new planning task for that domain, we instantiate the relationships from that graph to this particular instance. This instantiation operates in two phases. First, it generates two graphs: the former instantiating information from the initial state and the latter from the goal state. Second, it combines these two graphs into one unified graph by searching equivalences to extract landmark orderings. We evaluate the precision and recallof the information found by our approach over well-known planning domains.

Òscar Garibo-i-Orts, Nicolás Firbas, Laura Sebastiá et al.

Anomalous diffusion is present at all scales, from atomic to large scales. Some exemplary systems are; ultra-cold atoms, telomeres in the nucleus of cells, moisture transport in cement-based materials, the free movement of arthropods, and the migration patterns of birds. The characterization of the diffusion gives critical information about the dynamics of these systems and provides an interdisciplinary framework with which to study diffusive transport. Thus, the problem of identifying underlying diffusive regimes and inferring the anomalous diffusion exponent {$α$} with high confidence is critical to physics, chemistry, biology, and ecology. Classification and analysis of raw trajectories combining machine learning techniques with statistics extracted from them have widely been studied in the Anomalous Diffusion Challenge ge (Munoz-Gil et al., 2021). Here we present a new data-driven method for working with diffusive trajectories. This method utilizes Gramian Angular Fields (GAF) to encode one-dimensional trajectories as images (Gramian Matrices), while preserving their spatiotemporal structure for input to computer-vision models. This allows us to leverage two well-established pre-trained computer-vision models, ResNet and MobileNet, to characterize the underlying diffusive regime, and infer the anomalous diffusion exponent {$α$}. Short raw trajectories, of lengths between 10 and 50, are commonly encountered in single-particle tracking experiments and are the most difficult to characterize. We show that by using GAF images, we can outperform the current state-of-the-art while increasing accessibility to machine learning methods in an applied setting.

Alan Menk, Laura Sebastia, Rebeca Ferreira

Nowadays, recommender systems are present in many daily activities such as online shopping, browsing social networks, etc. Given the rising demand for reinvigoration of the tourist industry through information technology, recommenders have been included into tourism websites such as Expedia, Booking or Tripadvisor, among others. Furthermore, the amount of scientific papers related to recommender systems for tourism is on solid and continuous growth since 2004. Much of this growth is due to social networks that, besides to offer researchers the possibility of using a great mass of available and constantly updated data, they also enable the recommendation systems to become more personalised, effective and natural. This paper reviews and analyses many research publications focusing on tourism recommender systems that use social networks in their projects. We detail their main characteristics, like which social networks are exploited, which data is extracted, the applied recommendation techniques, the methods of evaluation, etc. Through a comprehensive literature review, we aim to collaborate with the future recommender systems, by giving some clear classifications and descriptions of the current tourism recommender systems.

Eliseo Marzal, Mohannad Babli, Eva Onaindia et al.

Temporal landmarks have been proved to be a helpful mechanism to deal with temporal planning problems, specifically to improve planners performance and handle problems with deadline constraints. In this paper, we show the strength of using temporal landmarks to handle the state trajectory constraints of PDDL3.0. We analyze the formalism of TempLM, a temporal planner particularly aimed at solving planning problems with deadlines, and we present a detailed study that exploits the underlying temporal landmark-based mechanism of TempLM for representing and reasoning with trajectory constraints.

Jesús Ibáñez-Ruiz, Laura Sebastiá, Eva Onaindia

Many tourist applications provide a personalized tourist agenda with the list of recommended activities to the user. These applications must undoubtedly deal with the constraints and preferences that define the user interests. Among these preferences, we can find those that define the travel style of the user, such as the rhythm of the trip, the number of visits to include in the tour or the priority to visits of special interest for the user. In this paper, we deal with the task of creating a customized tourist agenda as a planning and scheduling application capable of conveniently scheduling the most appropriate goals (visits) so as to maximize the user satisfaction with the tourist route. This paper makes an analysis of the meaning of the travel style preferences and compares the quality of the solutions obtained by two different solvers, a PDDL-based planner and a Constraint Satisfaction Problem solver. We also define several quality metrics and perform extensive experiments in order to evaluate the results obtained with both solvers.