Neuro-Symbolic and Automated Planning

Generalized Planning

Neuro-Symbolic AI Automated Planning

A suite of projects aimed at building foundation models and agentic frameworks that can reason, plan, and adapt across diverse domains. This line of work includes PlanFM, our effort to build compact foundation models for planning-like tasks through state-centric representations, tokenization, and learned transition models. Our work also spans the development of transformer-based architectures for learning sequential decision-making tasks, the design of agentic frameworks inspired by Thinking, Fast and Slow theories, and the creation of ontologies to support structured reasoning and planning.

Team: University of South Carolina, IBM Research, University of Udine, University of Brescia

Knowledge Engineering for Planning

Automated Planning Knowledge Representation

This project focuses on building ontologies to enhance AI planning systems. By structuring domain and planner knowledge, we improve planner selection, optimize performance via learned macros, and provide human-readable explanations for complex agent behaviors.

Team: Bharath Muppasani, Vishal Pallagani, Ritirupa Dey, Biplav Srivastava, Vignesh Narayanan

Collaborative Assistants

Neuro-Symbolic AI Trusted AI

Collaborative Assistants, popularly known as chatbots provide an easy interface for users to obtain answers for their queries. At AI4Society, we build collaborative assistants for various applications such as information retrieval, answer election based questions, help learn puzzle solving through a series of conversations, and obtain information regarding sensor data.

Team: Vishal Pallagani, Bharath Chandra, Kausik Lakkaraju, Biplav Srivastava

Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF)

Automated Planning Ontology

This project develops resource-efficient Multi-Agent Path Finding methods for robotic deployments. The HI-MAPF framework combines decentralized planning with lightweight conflict-triggered coordination to reduce inter-agent information sharing, and related maPO work provides ontology-driven explanations for planner behavior.

HI-MAPF (IROS 2026): [Poster] [Slides]

Team: Bharath Muppasani, Ritirupa Dey, Risha Patel, Biplav Srivastava, Vignesh Narayanan

Trusted AI

Trustworthy Group Recommendation

Recommender Systems Trusted AI

We study the problem of trustworthy group recommendation, where the focus goes beyond individual user preferences and dives into collective tastes and interests. Our objective is to build novel methods and useful tools for group recommendation with fairness, and drive different use cases. This work also connects to our Meal Recommendation and Exercise Recommendation pages for wellness-related applications. We extend this problem to the team formation domain, where we present an AI-based system to aid in collaborative teaming for researchers responding to funding agency proposals. Our approach leverages NLP techniques to extract and normalize technical skills from various data sources, facilitating matching and teaming based on constraints. We have gathered initial feedback from university researchers to deploy the prototype system and published a dataset for broader use.

Team: Siva Likitha Valluru, Sai Teja Paladi, Tarmo Koppel, Biplav Srivastava

Rating of AI Systems

Neuro-Symbolic AI Trusted AI

AI systems, such as facial recognition and sentiment analyzers, often show model uncertainty, leading to algorithmic bias, particularly concerning protected attributes like gender and race. This research seeks to understand and reduce bias by establishing causal relationships. Assigning ratings to AI systems based on this helps users make informed choices.

Team: Kausik Lakkaraju, Biplav Srivastava, Marco Valtorta

GenAI Results Comparator (GAICo)

Generative AI Evaluation Trusted AI

GenAI Results Comparator (GAICo) helps measure, compare, analyze, and visualize the quality of generative AI outputs across text, images, audio, structured data, planning sequences, and time-series data.

Team: Nitin Gupta, Pallav Koppisetti, Kausik Lakkaraju, Biplav Srivastava

LLM and Chatbot Testing

Trusted AI

Increasingly powerful Large Language Model (LLM) based chatbots, like ChatGPT and Bard, are becoming available to users that have the potential to revolutionize the quality of decision-making achieved by the public. We find that although the outputs of the chatbots are fluent and plausible, there are still critical gaps in providing accurate and reliable information using LLM-based chatbots.

Team: Kausik Lakkaraju, Sara Rae Jones, Sai Krishna Revanth Vuruma, Vishal Pallagani, Bharath Muppasani, Biplav Srivastava

Applications and Others

Literature Exploration Tool

NLP Information Retrieval Visualization

A literature exploration tool that retrieves papers, groups them into semantic themes, labels clusters with representative keywords, and visualizes how research areas evolve over time.

Team: Nitin Gupta, Bernardo Denkvitts, Vishal Pallagani, Bharath Muppasani, Biplav Srivastava

Opinion Network for Online User Safety

Planning

This project focuses on understanding and influencing information spread and opinion formation within networks by integrating the principles from Opinion Dynamics and Automated Planning.

Team: Bharath Muppasani, Vignesh Narayanan, Biplav Srivastava, Michael N. Huhns

Traffic Data Analysis

Data Analysis

The project aims to enhance road safety in South Carolina by analysing traffic data provided by Department of Transportation. We focused on identifying collision patterns and evaluating the Alive@25 program's impact to develop targeted recommendations for reducing accidents and improving road safety initiatives across urban and rural areas.

Team: Bharath Muppasani, Nitin Gupta, Biplav Srivastava, Lucas Vasconcelos

Rubik's Cube

Automated Planning

Rubik's Cube (RC) is a popular puzzle that is also computationally hard to solve. In this demonstration, we introduce the first PDDL formulation for the 3-dimension RC and solve it with off-the-shelf Fast-Downward planner. We also create a plan executor and visualizer to show how the plan achieves the intended goal. Our system has two audiences:(a) planning researchers who can explore a hard problem, and (b) RC learners wanting to learn how to solve the puzzle at their own pace.

Team: Bharath Muppasani, Vishal Pallagani, Kausik Lakkaraju, Biplav Srivastava, Forest Agostinelli

Insights with Power Data

Time-Series Data Analysis

The project aims to identify power usage patterns of any system, like buildings or factories, of interest using the harmonics data obtained from MiDAS IoT sensor. We also make power usage dataset (electricity consumption data and harmonics data) available from 8 institutions in manufacturing, education and medical institutions from the US and India.

Team: Bharath Muppasani, Cheyyur Jaya Anand, Chinmayi Appajigowda, Lokesh Johri, Biplav Srivastava