A Review of Symbolic, Subsymbolic and Hybrid Methods for Sequential Decision Making

Abstract

In the field of Sequential Decision Making (SDM), two paradigms have historically vied for supremacy: Automated Planning (AP) and Reinforcement Learning (RL). In the spirit of reconciliation, this paper reviews AP, RL and hybrid methods (e.g., novel learn to plan techniques) for solving Sequential Decision Processes (SDPs), focusing on their knowledge representation: symbolic, subsymbolic or a combination. Additionally, it also covers methods for learning the SDP structure. Finally, we compare the advantages and drawbacks of the existing methods and conclude that neurosymbolic AI poses a promising approach for SDM, since it combines AP and RL with a hybrid knowledge representation.