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A Review of Symbolic, Subsymbolic and Hybrid Methods for Sequential Decision Making
The field of Sequential Decision Making (SDM) provides tools for solving
Sequential Decision Processes (SDPs), where an agent must make a series of
decisions in order to complete a task or achieve a goal. Historically, two
competing SDM paradigms have view for supremacy. Automated Planning (AP)
proposes to solve SDPs by performing a reasoning process over a model of the
world, often represented symbolically. Conversely, Reinforcement Learning (RL)
proposes to learn the solution of the SDP from data, without a world model, and
represent the learned knowledge subsymbolically. In the spirit of
reconciliation, we provide a review of symbolic, subsymbolic and hybrid methods
for SDM. We cover both methods for solving SDPs (e.g., AP, RL and techniques
that learn to plan) and for learning aspects of their structure (e.g., world
models, state invariants and landmarks). To the best of our knowledge, no other
review in the field provides the same scope. As an additional contribution, we
discuss what properties an ideal method for SDM should exhibit and argue that
neurosymbolic AI is the current approach which most closely resembles this
ideal method. Finally, we outline several proposals to advance the field of SDM
via the integration of symbolic and subsymbolic AI