E: dillon dot chen 1 at gmail dot com
T: +33 05 61 33 63 48
W: https://dillonzchen.github.io
I am a PhD student in the union of automated planning and machine learning supervised by Sylvie Thiébaux at LAAS-CNRS in the University of Toulouse.
Automated planning generally refers to the class of sequential decision making problems formally specified by structured and symbolic models. My current interests lie in scaling up automated planning technology through learning knowledge that extrapolates to new unseen problems, and understanding the theoretical capabilities and limitations of such methods. So far I have worked on various delicious flavours of planning, including numeric, multi-objective, stochastic, non-deterministic, and hierarchical planning. I can also keep up to date with machine learning research, with publications in graph neural networks, foundation models, graph kernels, and applications.
For more research, keep reading below. To play the dog gacha, refresh the page (rates and rarities coming soon!).
[2025.02] | Most excited to research intern at Vector Institute. Thanks Sheila for the invitation! |
[2025.01] | 140kg bench press achieved. |
[2024.12] | Papers accepted to GenPlan and PRL workshops at AAAI-25. |
[C8] |
Dillon Z. Chen and Sylvie Thiébaux.
Graph Learning for Numeric Planning.
In 38th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems
(NeurIPS), 2024.
[ pdf | poster | slides | code ] |
[C7] |
Dillon Z. Chen and Sylvie Thiébaux.
Novelty Heuristics, Multi-Queue Search, and Portfolios
for Numeric Planning.
In 17th International Symposium on Combinatorial Search (SoCS),
2024.
[ pdf | poster | slides | code ] |
[C6] |
Dillon Z. Chen, Felipe Trevizan, and Sylvie Thiébaux.
Return to Tradition: Learning Reliable Heuristics with
Classical Machine Learning.
In 34th International Conference on Automated Planning and
Scheduling (ICAPS), 2024.
[ pdf | poster | slides | code | plots ] |
[C5] |
Dillon Z. Chen, Sylvie Thiébaux, and Felipe Trevizan.
Learning Domain-Independent Heuristics for Grounded and
Lifted Planning.
In 38th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2024.
[ pdf | poster | slides | code ] |
[C4] |
Qing Wang, Dillon Z. Chen, Asiri Wijesinghe, Shouheng Li, and Muhammad Farhan.
N-WL: A New Hierarchy of Expressivity
for Graph Neural Networks.
In 11th International Conference on Learning Representations
(ICLR), 2023.
[ pdf | poster | slides | code ] |
[C3] |
Dillon Z. Chen, Felipe Trevizan, and Sylvie Thiébaux.
Heuristic Search for Multi-Objective Probabilistic
Planning.
In 37th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2023.
[ pdf | poster | slides | code ] |
[C2] |
Dillon Z. Chen and Pascal Bercher.
The Complexity of Flexible FOND HTN
Planning.
In 32nd International Conference on Automated Planning and
Scheduling (ICAPS), 2022.
Best Undergraduate Student Paper Award.
[ pdf | poster | slides ] |
[C1] |
Dillon Z. Chen and Pascal Bercher.
Fully Observable Nondeterministic HTN Planning –
Formalisation and Complexity Results.
In 31st International Conference on Automated Planning and
Scheduling (ICAPS), 2021.
Best Undergraduate Student Paper Award.
[ pdf | poster | slides ] |
[W5] |
Dillon Z. Chen, Mingyu Hao, Sylvie Thiébaux, and Felipe Trevizan.
Graph Learning for Planning: The Story Thus Far and Open
Challenges.
In 8th Workshop on Generalization in Planning (GenPlan), 2025.
[ pdf | poster | slides ] |
[W4] |
Dillon Z. Chen, Pulkit Verma, Siddharth Srivastava, Michael Katz, and Sylvie
Thiébaux.
AI Planning: A Primer and Survey (Preliminary
Report).
In 8th Workshop on Bridging the Gap Between AI Planning and
Reinforcement Learning (PRL), 2025.
[ pdf | slides ] |
[W3] |
Dillon Z. Chen, Sylvie Thiébaux, and Felipe Trevizan.
GOOSE: Learning Domain-Independent
Heuristics.
In 7th Workshop on Generalization in Planning (GenPlan), 2023.
«Subsumed by [C5]».
[ pdf | poster | slides ] |
[W2] |
Dillon Z. Chen, Felipe Trevizan, and Sylvie Thiébaux.
Graph Neural Networks and Graph Kernels For Learning
Heuristics: Is there a difference?.
In 7th Workshop on Generalization in Planning (GenPlan), 2023.
«Subsumed by [C6]».
[ pdf | poster ] |
[W1] |
Dillon Z. Chen and Pascal Bercher.
The Complexity of Flexible FOND HTN
Planning.
In 4th ICAPS Workshop on Hierarchical Planning (HPlan), 2021.
«Subsumed by [C2]».
[ pdf ] |
[T1] |
Dillon Z. Chen.
GOOSE: Learning Heuristics and Parallelising Search
for Grounded and Lifted Planning.
Bachelor thesis, The Australian National University, 2023.
[ pdf ] |
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