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Title: Perception-Aware Point-Based Value Iteration for Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes

Paper content:
Partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) are a widely-used framework to model decision-making with uncertainty about the environment and under stochastic outcome.
In conventional POMDP models, the observations that the agent receives originate from fixed known distribution.
However, in a variety of real-world scenarios the agent has an active role in its perception by selecting which observations to receive.
Due to combinatorial nature of such selection process, it is computationally intractable to integrate the perception decision with the planning decision.
To prevent such expansion of the action space, we propose a greedy strategy for observation selection that aims to minimize the uncertainty in state.
We develop a novel point-based value iteration algorithm that incorporates the greedy strategy to achieve near-optimal uncertainty reduction for sampled belief points.
This in turn enables the solver to efficiently approximate the reachable subspace of belief simplex by essentially separating computations related to perception from planning.
Lastly, we implement the proposed solver and demonstrate its performance and computational advantage in a range of robotic scenarios where the robot simultaneously performs active perception and planning.
In the era of information explosion it is crucial to develop decision-making platforms that are able to judiciously extract useful information to accomplish a defined task.
The importance of mining useful data appears in many applications including artificial intelligence, robotics, networked systems and Internet of things.
Generally in these applications, a decision-maker, called an agent, must exploit the available information to compute an optimal strategy toward a given objective.Partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) provide a framework to model sequential decision-making with partial perception of the environment and under stochastic outcomes.
The flexibility of POMDPs and their variants in modeling real-world problems has led to extensive research on developing efficient algorithms for finding near-optimal policies.
Nevertheless, the majority of previous work on POMDPs either deal with sole perception or sole planning.While independent treatment of perception and planning deteriorates performance, an integrated approach usually becomes computationally intractable.
Thereupon, one must establish a trade-off between optimality and tractability when determining how much perception and planning rely on each other.
We show that by restricting the perception to the class of subset selection problems and exploiting submodular optimization techniques, it is possible to partially decouple computing perception and planning policies while considering their mutual effect on the overall policy value.In this work, we consider joint perception and planning in POMDPs.
More specifically, we consider an agent that decides about two sets of actions; perception actions and planning actions.
The perception actions, such as employing a sensor, only affect the belief of the agent regarding the state of the environment.
The planning actions, such as choosing navigation direction, are the ones that affect the transition of the environment from one state to another.
In subset selection problems, at each time step, due to power, processing capability, and cost constraints, the agent can pick a subset of available information sources along a planning action.
The subset selection problem arise in various applications in control systems and signal processing, in wireless sensor networks, as well as machine learning BID7 and have been widely-studied (Shamaiah et al., 2010; BID11 .
However, the previous work on sensor selection problems assume that the planning strategy is known, while in this work, we simultaneously learn a selection strategy and a planning strategy.
In this paper, we studied joint active perception and planning in POMDP models.
To capture the structure of the problem, we introduced AP 2 -POMDPs that have to pick a cardinality-constrained subset of observations, in addition to original planning action.
To tackle the computational challenge of adding combinatorial actions, we proposed a greedy scheme for observation selection.
The greedy scheme aims to minimize the conditional entropy of belief which is a metric of uncertainty about the state.
We provided a theoretical analysis for the greedy algorithm that led to boundedness of value function difference between optimal entropy reduction and its greedy counterpart.
Furthermore, founded upon the theoretical guarantee of greedy active perception, we developed a point-based value iteration solver for AP 2 -POMDPs.
The idea introduced in the solver to address active perception is general and can be applied on state-of-the-art point-based solvers.
Lastly, we implemented and evaluated the proposed solver on a variety of robotic navigation scenarios.

assistant: text: We develop a point-based value iteration solver for POMDPs with active perception and planning tasks.