Under-Approximating Expected Total Rewards in POMDPs

arXiv (Cornell University)

Abstract

We consider the problem: is the optimal expected total reward to reach a goal state in a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) below a given threshold? We tackle this -- generally undecidable -- problem by computing under-approximations on these total expected rewards. This is done by abstracting finite unfoldings of the infinite belief MDP of the POMDP. The key issue is to find a suitable under-approximation of the value function. We provide two techniques: a simple (cut-off) technique that uses a good policy on the POMDP, and a more advanced technique (belief clipping) that uses minimal shifts of probabilities between beliefs. We use mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) to find such minimal probability shifts and experimentally show that our techniques scale quite well while providing tight lower bounds on the expected total reward.

Authors 3

1. Alexander Bork Aachen

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   RWTH Aachen University , Aachen , Germany

2. Joost-Pieter Katoen Aachen

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   RWTH Aachen University , Aachen , Germany

3. Tim Quatmann Aachen

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   RWTH Aachen University , Aachen , Germany