Abstraction, Reformulation, and Approximation: 5th International Symposium, SARA 2002, Kananaskis, Alberta, Canada, August 2-4, 2002, Proceedings(Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence)

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Symposium on Abstraction, Reformulation, and Approximation, SARA 2002, held in Kananaskis, Alberta, Canada, in August 2002. The 15 revised full papers and 6 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. Also included are 4 invited papers and 14 abstracts. All current aspects of abstraction, reformulation, and approximation in the context of human common-sense reasoning, problem solving, and efficiently reasoning in complex domains are addressed. Among the application fields of these techniques are automatic programming, constraint satisfaction, design, diagnosis, machine learning, search, planning, reasoning, game playing, scheduling, and theorem proving.

Table of Contents:
Invited Presentations.- Model Checking and Abstraction.- Reformulation in Planning.- Spatiotemporal Abstraction of Stochastic Sequential Processes.- State Space Relaxation and Search Strategies in Dynamic Programming.- Invited Presentations.- Admissible Moves in Two-Player Games.- Dynamic Bundling: Less Effort for More Solutions.- Symbolic Heuristic Search Using Decision Diagrams.- On the Construction of Human-Automation Interfaces by Formal Abstraction.- Pareto Optimization of Temporal Decisions.- An Information-Theoretic Characterization of Abstraction in Diagnosis and Hypothesis Selection.- A Tractable Query Cache by Approximation.- An Algebraic Framework for Abstract Model Checking.- Action Timing Discretization with Iterative-Refinement.- Formalizing Approximate Objects and Theories: Some Initial Results.- Model Minimization in Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning.- Learning Options in Reinforcement Learning.- Approximation Techniques for Non-linear Problems with Continuum of Solutions.- Approximation of Relations by Propositional Formulas: Complexity and Semantics.- Abstracting Visual Percepts to Learn Concepts.- Short Presentations.- PAC Meditation on Boolean Formulas.- On the Reformulation of Vehicle Routing Problems and Scheduling Problems.- The Oracular Constraints Method.- Performance of Lookahead Control Policies in the Face of Abstractions and Approximations.- TTree: Tree-Based State Generalization with Temporally Abstract Actions.- Ontology-Driven Induction of Decision Trees at Multiple Levels of Abstraction.- Research Summaries.- Abstracting Imperfect Information Game Trees.- Using Abstraction for Heuristic Search and Planning.- Approximation Techniques in Multiagent Learning.- Abstraction and Reformulation in GraphPlan.- Abstract Reasoning for Planning and Coordination.- Research Summary: Abstraction Techniques, and Their Value.- Reformulation of Non-binary Constraints.- Reformulating Combinatorial Optimization as Constraint Satisfaction.- Autonomous Discovery of Abstractions through Interaction with an Environment.- Interface Verification: Discrete Abstractions of Hybrid Systems.- Learning Semi-lattice Codebooks for Image Compression.- Research Summary.- Principled Exploitation of Heuristic Information.- Reformulation of Temporal Constraint Networks.