Breaking Task Impasses Quickly: Adaptive Neuro-Symbolic Learning for Open-World Robotics
This addresses the problem of slow adaptation and sample inefficiency for autonomous systems in open-world environments, representing an incremental improvement over existing hybrid methods.
The paper tackles the challenge of adapting to unforeseen novelties in open-world robotics by presenting a neuro-symbolic framework that integrates hierarchical abstractions, task and motion planning, and reinforcement learning, achieving faster convergence, improved sample efficiency, and superior robustness over state-of-the-art hybrid methods in robotic manipulation and autonomous driving.
Adapting to unforeseen novelties in open-world environments remains a major challenge for autonomous systems. While hybrid planning and reinforcement learning (RL) approaches show promise, they often suffer from sample inefficiency, slow adaptation, and catastrophic forgetting. We present a neuro-symbolic framework integrating hierarchical abstractions, task and motion planning (TAMP), and reinforcement learning to enable rapid adaptation in robotics. Our architecture combines symbolic goal-oriented learning and world model-based exploration to facilitate rapid adaptation to environmental changes. Validated in robotic manipulation and autonomous driving, our approach achieves faster convergence, improved sample efficiency, and superior robustness over state-of-the-art hybrid methods, demonstrating its potential for real-world deployment.