24,909 research outputs found
Perseus: Randomized Point-based Value Iteration for POMDPs
Partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) form an attractive
and principled framework for agent planning under uncertainty. Point-based
approximate techniques for POMDPs compute a policy based on a finite set of
points collected in advance from the agents belief space. We present a
randomized point-based value iteration algorithm called Perseus. The algorithm
performs approximate value backup stages, ensuring that in each backup stage
the value of each point in the belief set is improved; the key observation is
that a single backup may improve the value of many belief points. Contrary to
other point-based methods, Perseus backs up only a (randomly selected) subset
of points in the belief set, sufficient for improving the value of each belief
point in the set. We show how the same idea can be extended to dealing with
continuous action spaces. Experimental results show the potential of Perseus in
large scale POMDP problems
Anytime Point-Based Approximations for Large POMDPs
The Partially Observable Markov Decision Process has long been recognized as
a rich framework for real-world planning and control problems, especially in
robotics. However exact solutions in this framework are typically
computationally intractable for all but the smallest problems. A well-known
technique for speeding up POMDP solving involves performing value backups at
specific belief points, rather than over the entire belief simplex. The
efficiency of this approach, however, depends greatly on the selection of
points. This paper presents a set of novel techniques for selecting informative
belief points which work well in practice. The point selection procedure is
combined with point-based value backups to form an effective anytime POMDP
algorithm called Point-Based Value Iteration (PBVI). The first aim of this
paper is to introduce this algorithm and present a theoretical analysis
justifying the choice of belief selection technique. The second aim of this
paper is to provide a thorough empirical comparison between PBVI and other
state-of-the-art POMDP methods, in particular the Perseus algorithm, in an
effort to highlight their similarities and differences. Evaluation is performed
using both standard POMDP domains and realistic robotic tasks
Reinforcement Learning: A Survey
This paper surveys the field of reinforcement learning from a
computer-science perspective. It is written to be accessible to researchers
familiar with machine learning. Both the historical basis of the field and a
broad selection of current work are summarized. Reinforcement learning is the
problem faced by an agent that learns behavior through trial-and-error
interactions with a dynamic environment. The work described here has a
resemblance to work in psychology, but differs considerably in the details and
in the use of the word ``reinforcement.'' The paper discusses central issues of
reinforcement learning, including trading off exploration and exploitation,
establishing the foundations of the field via Markov decision theory, learning
from delayed reinforcement, constructing empirical models to accelerate
learning, making use of generalization and hierarchy, and coping with hidden
state. It concludes with a survey of some implemented systems and an assessment
of the practical utility of current methods for reinforcement learning.Comment: See http://www.jair.org/ for any accompanying file
Decentralized Control of Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes using Belief Space Macro-actions
The focus of this paper is on solving multi-robot planning problems in
continuous spaces with partial observability. Decentralized partially
observable Markov decision processes (Dec-POMDPs) are general models for
multi-robot coordination problems, but representing and solving Dec-POMDPs is
often intractable for large problems. To allow for a high-level representation
that is natural for multi-robot problems and scalable to large discrete and
continuous problems, this paper extends the Dec-POMDP model to the
decentralized partially observable semi-Markov decision process (Dec-POSMDP).
The Dec-POSMDP formulation allows asynchronous decision-making by the robots,
which is crucial in multi-robot domains. We also present an algorithm for
solving this Dec-POSMDP which is much more scalable than previous methods since
it can incorporate closed-loop belief space macro-actions in planning. These
macro-actions are automatically constructed to produce robust solutions. The
proposed method's performance is evaluated on a complex multi-robot package
delivery problem under uncertainty, showing that our approach can naturally
represent multi-robot problems and provide high-quality solutions for
large-scale problems
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