Action Generative Networks Planning for Deformable Object with Raw Observations

Synthesizing plans for a deformable object to transit from initial observations to goal observations, both of which are represented by high-dimensional data (namely "raw" data), is challenging due to the difficulty of learning abstract state representations of raw data and transition models of continuous states and continuous actions. Even though there have been some approaches making remarkable progress regarding the planning problem, they often neglect actions between observations and are unable to generate action sequences from initial observations to goal observations. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm framework, namely AGN. We first learn a state-abstractor model to abstract states from raw observations, a state-generator model to generate raw observations from states, a heuristic model to predict actions to be executed in current states, and a transition model to transform current states to next states after executing specific actions. After that, we directly generate plans for a deformable object by performing the four models. We evaluate our approach in continuous domains and show that our approach is effective with comparison to state-of-the-art algorithms.