State Encodings for GNN-Based Lifted Planners

The application of graph neural networks (GNNs) to learn heuristic functions in classical planning is gaining traction. Despite the variety of methods proposed in the literature to encode classical planning tasks for GNNs, a comparative study evaluating their relative performances has been lacking. Moreover, some encodings have been assessed solely for their expressiveness rather than practical effectiveness in planning. This paper provides an extensive comparative analysis of existing encodings. Our results indicate that the smallest encoding based on Gaifman graphs, not yet applied in planning, outperforms the rest due to its fast evaluation times and the informativeness of the resulting heuristic. The overall coverage measured on the IPC almost reaches that of the state-of-the-art planner LAMA while exhibiting rather complementary strengths across different domains.