159 research outputs found
Optimizing Memory-Bounded Controllers for Decentralized POMDPs
We present a memory-bounded optimization approach for solving
infinite-horizon decentralized POMDPs. Policies for each agent are represented
by stochastic finite state controllers. We formulate the problem of optimizing
these policies as a nonlinear program, leveraging powerful existing nonlinear
optimization techniques for solving the problem. While existing solvers only
guarantee locally optimal solutions, we show that our formulation produces
higher quality controllers than the state-of-the-art approach. We also
incorporate a shared source of randomness in the form of a correlation device
to further increase solution quality with only a limited increase in space and
time. Our experimental results show that nonlinear optimization can be used to
provide high quality, concise solutions to decentralized decision problems
under uncertainty.Comment: Appears in Proceedings of the Twenty-Third Conference on Uncertainty
in Artificial Intelligence (UAI2007
Near-Optimal Adversarial Policy Switching for Decentralized Asynchronous Multi-Agent Systems
A key challenge in multi-robot and multi-agent systems is generating
solutions that are robust to other self-interested or even adversarial parties
who actively try to prevent the agents from achieving their goals. The
practicality of existing works addressing this challenge is limited to only
small-scale synchronous decision-making scenarios or a single agent planning
its best response against a single adversary with fixed, procedurally
characterized strategies. In contrast this paper considers a more realistic
class of problems where a team of asynchronous agents with limited observation
and communication capabilities need to compete against multiple strategic
adversaries with changing strategies. This problem necessitates agents that can
coordinate to detect changes in adversary strategies and plan the best response
accordingly. Our approach first optimizes a set of stratagems that represent
these best responses. These optimized stratagems are then integrated into a
unified policy that can detect and respond when the adversaries change their
strategies. The near-optimality of the proposed framework is established
theoretically as well as demonstrated empirically in simulation and hardware
Energy Efficient Execution of POMDP Policies
Recent advances in planning techniques for partially observable Markov decision processes have focused on online search techniques and offline point-based value iteration. While these techniques allow practitioners to obtain policies for fairly large problems, they assume that a non-negligible amount of computation can be done between each decision point. In contrast, the recent proliferation of mobile and embedded devices has lead to a surge of applications that could benefit from state of the art planning techniques if they can operate under severe constraints on computational resources. To that effect, we describe two techniques to compile policies into controllers that can be executed by a mere table lookup at each decision point. The first approach compiles policies induced by a set of alpha vectors (such as those obtained by point-based techniques) into approximately equivalent controllers, while the second approach performs a simulation to compile arbitrary policies into approximately equivalent controllers. We also describe an approach to compress controllers by removing redundant and dominated nodes, often yielding smaller and yet better controllers. Further compression and higher value can sometimes be obtained by considering stochastic controllers. The compilation and compression techniques are demonstrated on benchmark problems as well as a mobile application to help persons with Alzheimer's to way-find. The battery consumption of several POMDP policies is compared against finite-state controllers learned using methods introduced in this paper. Experiments performed on the Nexus 4 phone show that finite-state controllers are the least battery consuming POMDP policies
Isomorph-Free Branch and Bound Search for Finite State Controllers
The recent proliferation of smart-phones and other wearable devices has lead
to a surge of new mobile applications. Partially observable Markov decision
processes provide a natural framework to design applications that
continuously make decisions based on noisy sensor measurements. However,
given the limited battery life, there is a need to minimize the amount of
online computation. This can be achieved by compiling a policy into a
finite state controller since there is no need for belief monitoring or
online search. In this paper, we propose a new branch and bound technique
to search for a good controller. In contrast to many existing algorithms
for controllers, our search technique is not subject to local optima. We
also show how to reduce the amount of search by avoiding the enumeration of
isomorphic controllers and by taking advantage of suitable upper and lower
bounds. The approach is demonstrated on several benchmark problems as well
as a smart-phone application to assist persons with Alzheimer's to wayfind
Stick-Breaking Policy Learning in Dec-POMDPs
Expectation maximization (EM) has recently been shown to be an efficient
algorithm for learning finite-state controllers (FSCs) in large decentralized
POMDPs (Dec-POMDPs). However, current methods use fixed-size FSCs and often
converge to maxima that are far from optimal. This paper considers a
variable-size FSC to represent the local policy of each agent. These
variable-size FSCs are constructed using a stick-breaking prior, leading to a
new framework called \emph{decentralized stick-breaking policy representation}
(Dec-SBPR). This approach learns the controller parameters with a variational
Bayesian algorithm without having to assume that the Dec-POMDP model is
available. The performance of Dec-SBPR is demonstrated on several benchmark
problems, showing that the algorithm scales to large problems while
outperforming other state-of-the-art methods
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