Aachen Symposium

The aim of the symposium is to get together, on-site, an active group of prominent researchers in the area of representation learning for acting and planning, with the purpose of exchanging ideas in a relaxed and friendly atmosphere. Each researcher will have a chance to present their work, to listen and learn from the work of others, and to engage in discussions and activities.

The topics include but are not limited to learning action models, policies, and other high-level representations for acting and planning, using either combinatorial or deep learning approaches, with an emphasis on structure, generalization, transparency, and understanding. Work on reinforcement learning aimed at learning and exploiting structure for generalization is definitely in the scope of the meeting, like neurosymbolic methods applied in the setting of acting and planning.

This is the second edition of the Aachen Symposium on Representation Learning to Act and Plan. Feel free to check out the previous edition’s webpage below.

Participation is by invitation only. The organizers cover the expenses for hotel and meals but not travel. The current list of participants (as of July 14^th) is:

The meeting is organized by a team from the RLeap group of the Chair of Machine Learning and Reasoning (Computer Science 6) at RWTH Aachen University.

The meeting will be held at Kasteel Vaalsbroek, where the participants will stay. This is in Vaals, near Aachen, but across the border in the Netherlands (Aachen is in Germany but next to the border with both Belgium and the Netherlands).

For attendees traveling by air, there are four international airports from which Aachen can conveniently be reached by train in 1.5 hours with at most one change. These are:

• FRA – Frankfurt Airport
• DUS – Düsseldorf Airport
• CGN – Cologne Bonn Airport
• BRU – Brussels Airport

Alternatively, Aachen or Maastricht can be reached in around 2.5 hours from these airports, respectively:

• NRN – Weeze Airport
• AMS – Amsterdam Airport Schiphol

Possible connections from each airport are listed below.
Train tickets to Aachen can be purchased from Deutsche Bahn. From there, the venue in Vaals is only 15 minutes by taxi.
Train tickets to Maastricht are available at Nederlandse Spoorwegen. Here, it takes 45 minutes to the venue by bus and tickets can be bought via the Glimble app.

To visit Aachen during the symposium, you can leave from the venue at the bus stop Vaals, Heuvel, a 20-minute walk, and target the bus stop Aachen, Elisenbrunnen, which is right in the center of Aachen. The same bus plus walk combination works to come to the venue from Aachen. Bus tickets are available from the driver or via the Naveo app (“Einzelticket Erwachsene Preisstufe 1” for 3.60 €).

The funding for the symposium comes from the Humboldt Foundation through the Alexander von Humboldt Professorship for AI granted to Hector Geffner in 2023.