Calendar

Subject to change.

Planning Foundations

Sep 2
LectureIntro
Slides
Sep 4
LectureOffline Planning in MDPs
Slides
Sep 8
HWHW0 Due
HW0
Sep 9
LectureOnline Planning in MDPs
Slides
Sep 11
LectureMonte Carlo Methods
Slides
Sep 15
HWHW1 Due
HW1
Sep 16
LecturePartial Observability
Slides
Sep 18
LecturePlanning and RL
Slides
Sep 22
HWHW2 Due
HW2
Sep 23
LecturePlanning in Factored Spaces
Slides
Sep 25
LectureMotion Planning
Slides
Sep 29
HWHW3 Due
HW3
Sep 30
LectureTrajectory Optimization
Slides
Oct 2
LectureHierarchy and Abstraction
Slides
Oct 6
ProjectFinal Project Proposal Due
Guidelines
Oct 7
LectureGuest Lecture (TBD)
Slides

Learning to Make Planning Possible

Oct 9
PapersLearning Symbolic Abstractions for Planning
“From skills to symbols: learning symbolic representations for abstract high-level planning” (Konidaris et al., 2018)
PDF
“Classical planning in deep latent space: bridging the subsymbolic-symbolic boundary” (Asai et al., 2018)
PDF
“InterPreT: interactive predicate learning from language feedback for generalizable task planning” (Han et al., 2024)
PDF
Oct 14
No Class (Fall Recess)
Oct 16
No Class (Fall Recess)
Oct 20
HWPre-Class Paper Reviews Due
Guidelines
Oct 21
PapersLearning Latent Space Models for Motion Planning
“Robot motion planning in learned latent spaces” (Ichter & Pavone, 2019)
PDF
“Latent planning via expansive tree search” (Gieselmann & Pokorny, 2022)
PDF
“Motion planning by learning the solution manifold in trajectory optimization” (Osa, 2022)
PDF
Oct 22
HWPre-Class Paper Reviews Due
Oct 23
PapersLearning Latent Space Models for TrajOpt
“Embed to control: a locally linear latent dynamics model for control from raw images” (Watter et al., 2015)
PDF
“Dream to control: learning behaviors by latent imagination” (Hafner et al., 2020)
PDF
“Guaranteed discovery of controllable latent states with multi-step inverse models” (Lamb et al., 2022)
PDF
Oct 27
HWPre-Class Paper Reviews Due
Oct 28
PapersLearning Models for Task and Motion Planning
“Predicate invention for bilevel planning” (Silver et al., 2023)
PDF
“From real world to logic and back: learning generalizable relational concepts for long horizon robot planning” (Shah et al., 2025)
PDF
“VisualPredicator: learning abstract world models with neuro-symbolic predicates for robot planning” (Liang et al., 2025)
PDF
Oct 30
No Class
Use the extra time to work on final projects!
Oct 31
ProjectProject Update 1 Due
Guidelines

Learning to Make Planning Fast

Nov 3
HWPre-Class Paper Reviews Due
Nov 4
PapersLearning to Guide MCTS
“Mastering the game of Go with deep neural networks and tree search” (Silver et al., 2016)
PDF
“Mastering chess and shogi by self-play with a general reinforcement learning algorithm” (Silver et al., 2017)
PDF
“Mastering atari, go, chess and shogi by planning with a learned model” (Schrittwieser et al., 2019)
PDF
Nov 5
HWPre-Class Paper Reviews Due
Nov 6
PapersLearning Policies to Guide Planning
“Learning control knowledge for forward search planning” (Yoon et al., 2008)
PDF
“PG3: policy-guided planning for generalized policy generation” (Yang et al., 2022)
PDF
“Policy-guided lazy search with feedback for task and motion planning” (Khodeir et al., 2022)
PDF
Nov 10
HWPre-Class Paper Reviews Due
Nov 11
PapersLearning Samplers for Motion Planning and TAMP
“Motion planning networks: bridging the gap between learning-based and classical motion planners” (Qureshi et al., 2020)
PDF
“Learning constrained distributions of robot configurations with generative adversarial networks” (Lembono et al., 2021)
PDF
“Compositional diffusion-based continuous constraint solvers” (Yang et al., 2023)
PDF
Nov 12
HWPre-Class Paper Reviews Due
Nov 13
PapersClassical Planning with LLMs
“LLMs can’t plan, but can help planning in LLM-Modulo frameworks” (Kambhampati et al., 2024)
PDF
“Generalized planning in PDDL domains with pretrained large language models” (Silver et al., 2023)
PDF
“Classical planning with LLM-generated heuristics: challenging the state of the art with python code” (Corrêa et al., 2025)
PDF
Nov 17
HWPre-Class Paper Reviews Due
Nov 18
PapersLearning Factored State Abstractions
“State abstraction discovery from irrelevant state variables” (Jong & Stone, 2005)
PDF
“Planning with learned object importance in large problem instances using graph neural networks” (Silver et al., 2021)
PDF
“CAMPs: learning context-specific abstractions for efficient planning in factored MDPs” (Chitnis et al., 2020)
PDF
Nov 19
HWPre-Class Paper Reviews Due
Nov 20
PapersLearning Action Abstractions (Options)
“Between MDPs and semi-MDPs: A framework for temporal abstraction in reinforcement learning” (Sutton et al., 1999)
PDF
“Diversity is all you need: learning skills without a reward function” (Eysenbach et al., 2018)
PDF
“Finding options that minimize planning time” (Jinnai et al., 2019)
PDF
Nov 24
ProjectProject Update 2 Due
Guidelines
Nov 25
No Class (Thanksgiving Recess)
Nov 27
No Class (Thanksgiving Recess)

Planning to Learn

Dec 1
HWPre-Class Paper Reviews Due
Dec 2
PapersExploration + Planning
“Exploration in model-based reinforcement learning by empirically estimating learning progress” (Lopes et al., 2012)
PDF
“Curiosity-driven exploration by self-supervised prediction” (Pathak et al., 2017)
PDF
“Trial and error: exploration-based trajectory optimization for LLM agents” (Song et al., 2024)
PDF
Dec 3
HWPre-Class Paper Reviews Due
Dec 4
PapersPlanning to Learn with Human-in-the-Loop
“Asking for help using inverse semantics” (Knepper et al., 2014)
PDF
“Human-in-the-loop task and motion planning for imitation learning” (Mandlekar et al., 2023)
PDF
“To ask or not to ask: human-in-the-loop contextual bandits with applications in robot-assisted feeding” (Banerjee et al., 2024)
PDF
Dec 15
ProjectFinal Project Due
Guidelines