The More the Merrier?! Evaluating the Effect of Landmark Extraction Algorithms on Landmark-Based Goal Recognition

Abstract: Recent approaches to goal and plan recognition using classical planning domains have achieved state of the art results in terms of both recognition time and accuracy by using heuristics based on planning landmarks. To achieve such fast recognition time these approaches use efficient, but incomplete, algorithms to extract only a subset of landmarks for planning domains and problems, at the cost of some accuracy. In this paper, we investigate the impact and effect of using various landmark extraction algorithms capable of extracting a larger proportion of the landmarks for each given planning problem, up to exhaustive landmark extraction. We perform an extensive empirical evaluation of various landmark-based heuristics when using different percentages of the full set of landmarks. Results show that having more landmarks does not necessarily mean achieving higher accuracy and lower spread, as the additional extracted landmarks may not necessarily increase be helpful towards the goal recognition task.