Michael Katz

Principal Research Scientist at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center

🏆 AAAI Senior Member 🏛️ AAAI Executive Council 🎯 ICAPS Executive Council 🤖 AI Planning, World Models & LLMs
Michael Katz

Latest News & Highlights

Recent achievements and activities

Research Focus

Advancing AI through automated planning and language models

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AI Planning & LLMs

Current Focus

Developing reliable and efficient methods for planning with large language models. Recent work includes Thought of Search (ToS) and AutoToS for automated planning.

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Automated Planning

Core Expertise

Classical planning, heuristic search, abstraction techniques, and structural patterns. Winner of IPC 2018 cost-optimal track with Delfi planner.

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Planning & RL Integration

Hybrid Approaches

Bridging automated planning and reinforcement learning techniques for autonomous systems. Co-creator of the PRL workshop series.

Awards & Recognition

Honors and achievements in AI research

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ICAPS Influential Paper Award
2023

Test-of-Time Award for pioneering work that established the core theoretical foundations underlying most goal-distance estimates used in cost-optimal planning today

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International Planning Competitions (IPC) Winner
2018, 2014

Winner 2018 (Delfi planner, cost-optimal track)
Runner-up 2014 (Mercury planner, satisficing track)

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ICAPS Best Dissertation
2011

Implicit Abstraction Heuristics for Cost-Optimal Planning

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IPC Innovative Planner
2014

Mercury planner innovation award

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ISR Core Challenge
2022-2023

Multiple gold, silver, and bronze medals

ICAPS Best Demo Awards
2020, 2022

Winner and runner-up

Research Impact

100+

Publications

In top AI conferences and journals

25+

Patents

Granted and published

10+

Major Awards

Including ICAPS and IPC honors

Featured Publications

Recent impactful research

Thought of Search

Thought of Search: Planning with Language Models Through The Lens of Efficiency

M. Katz, H. Kokel, K. Srinivas, S. Sohrabi

NeurIPS 2024

Automating Thought of Search: A Journey Towards Soundness and Completeness

M. Katz, H. Kokel, K. Srinivas, S. Sohrabi

ICAPS 2026

ACPBench

ACPBench: Reasoning About Action, Change, and Planning

H. Kokel, M. Katz, K. Srinivas, S. Sohrabi

AAAI 2025

ACPBench Hard: Challenging Benchmarks for Reasoning About Action, Change, and Planning

H. Kokel, M. Katz, K. Srinivas, S. Sohrabi

ICLR 2026

Make Planning Research Rigorous Again!

M. Katz, H. Kokel, C. Muise, S. Sohrabi, S. Sreedharan

arXiv 2025

View All Publications