LLM-Evolved Pattern Generators for Optimal Classical Planning

Abstract

Learned heuristics have recently become a competitive alternative to traditional domain-independent heuristics for satisficing planning. Existing approaches, however, focus on improving search guidance rather than guaranteeing admissibility, which makes them unsuitable for optimal classical planning. We present the first method for learning domain-dependent heuristics that are admissible by design and thus preserve the optimality guarantees of A* search. Instead of learning a direct mapping from states to heuristic values, we learn to construct abstractions that induce admissible heuristics. We use an LLM-driven evolutionary program-synthesis framework to obtain, for each domain, a program that produces a pattern collection for any task in that domain, and we combine the resulting patterns admissibly via saturated cost partitioning. Empirically, the learned programs encode interpretable domain-specific insights, run with negligible overhead at test time and yield heuristics that match the coverage of state-of-the-art domain-independent baselines on several domains while evaluating each state substantially faster.