Related papers: Options of Interest: Temporal Abstraction with Int…

Working with causal models at different levels of abstraction is an important feature of science. Existing work has already considered the problem of expressing formally the relation of abstraction between causal models. In this paper, we…

Previous approaches to constructing abstractions for control systems rely on geometric conditions or, in the case of an interconnected control system, a condition on the interconnection topology. Since these conditions are not always…

In this paper we introduce a framework for option model composition. Option models are temporal abstractions that, like macro-operators in classical planning, jump directly from a start state to an end state. Prior work has focused on…

The abstraction of dynamical systems is a powerful tool that enables the design of feedback controllers using a correct-by-design framework. We investigate a novel scheme to obtain data-driven abstractions of discrete-time stochastic…

According to a mainstream position in contemporary cognitive science and philosophy, the use of abstract compositional concepts is both a necessary and a sufficient condition for the presence of genuine thought. In this article, we show how…

At the intersection of dynamical systems, control theory, and formal methods lies the construction of symbolic abstractions: these typically represent simpler, finite-state models whose behavior mimics that of an underlying concrete system…

A common technique to verify complex logic specifications for dynamical systems is the construction of symbolic abstractions: simpler, finite-state models whose behaviour mimics the one of the systems of interest. Typically, abstractions…

We introduce a variational approach to learning and inference of temporally hierarchical structure and representation for sequential data. We propose the Variational Temporal Abstraction (VTA), a hierarchical recurrent state space model…

Contracts are a well-established approach for describing and analyzing behavioral aspects of web service compositions. The theory of contracts comes equipped with a notion of compatibility between clients and servers that ensures that every…

In previous work we developed a framework of computational models for function and object execution. The models on an higher level of abstraction in this framework allow for concurrent execution of functions and objects. We show that the…

The actor model eases the definition of concurrent programs with non uniform behaviors. Static analysis of such a model was previously done in a data-flow oriented way, with type systems. This approach was based on constraint set resolution…

Hierarchical reinforcement learning has focused on discovering temporally extended actions, such as options, that can provide benefits in problems requiring extensive exploration. One promising approach that learns these options end-to-end…

Structural causal models provide a formalism to express causal relations between variables of interest. Models and variables can represent a system at different levels of abstraction, whereby relations may be coarsened and refined according…

Hierarchical methods in reinforcement learning have the potential to reduce the amount of decisions that the agent needs to perform when learning new tasks. However, finding reusable useful temporal abstractions that facilitate fast…

ASP programs are a convenient tool for problem solving, whereas with large problem instances the size of the state space can be prohibitive. We consider abstraction as a means of over-approximation and introduce a method to automatically…

We introduce a method which enables a recurrent dynamics model to be temporally abstract. Our approach, which we call Adaptive Skip Intervals (ASI), is based on the observation that in many sequential prediction tasks, the exact time at…

Induction is the process by which we obtain predictive laws or theories or models of the world. We consider the structural aspect of induction. We answer the question as to whether we can find a finite and minmalistic set of operations on…

In this work, we introduce a compositional framework for the construction of finite abstractions (a.k.a. symbolic models) of interconnected discrete-time control systems. The compositional scheme is based on the joint dissipativity-type…

Real-world sequential decision-making often involves parameterized action spaces that require both, decisions regarding discrete actions and decisions about continuous action parameters governing how an action is executed. Existing…

This paper is a contribution to the theoretical foundations of strategies. We first present a general definition of abstract strategies which is extensional in the sense that a strategy is defined explicitly as a set of derivations of an…