Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) are a natural and general model in reinforcement learning that take into account the agent's uncertainty about its current state. In the literature on POMDPs, it is customary to assume access to a planning oracle that computes an optimal policy when the parameters are known, even though the problem is known to be computationally hard. Almost all existing planning algorithms either run in exponential time, lack provable performance guarantees, or require placing strong assumptions on the transition dynamics under every possible policy. In this work, we revisit the planning problem and ask: are there natural and well-motivated assumptions that make planning easy? Our main result is a quasipolynomial-time algorithm for planning in (one-step) observable POMDPs. Specifically, we assume that well-separated distributions on states lead to well-separated distributions on observations, and thus the observations are at least somewhat informative in each step. Crucially, this assumption places no restrictions on the transition dynamics of the POMDP; nevertheless, it implies that near-optimal policies admit quasi-succinct descriptions, which is not true in general (under standard hardness assumptions). Our analysis is based on new quantitative bounds for filter stability -- i.e. the rate at which an optimal filter for the latent state forgets its initialization. Furthermore, we prove matching hardness for planning in observable POMDPs under the Exponential Time Hypothesis.
This paper studies the problem of risk-averse receding horizon motion planning for agents with uncertain dynamics, in the presence of stochastic, dynamic obstacles. We propose a model predictive control (MPC) scheme that formulates the obstacle avoidance constraint using coherent risk measures. To handle disturbances, or process noise, in the state dynamics, the state constraints are tightened in a risk-aware manner to provide a disturbance feedback policy. We also propose a waypoint following algorithm that uses the proposed MPC scheme for discrete distributions and prove its risk-sensitive recursive feasibility while guaranteeing finite-time task completion. We further investigate some commonly used coherent risk metrics, namely, conditional value-at-risk (CVaR), entropic value-at-risk (EVaR), and g-entropic risk measures, and propose a tractable incorporation within MPC. We illustrate our framework via simulation studies.
The approximate uniform sampling of graph realizations with a given degree sequence is an everyday task in several social science, computer science, engineering etc. projects. One approach is using Markov chains. The best available current result about the well-studied switch Markov chain is that it is rapidly mixing on P-stable degree sequences (see DOI:10.1016/j.ejc.2021.103421). The switch Markov chain does not change any degree sequence. However, there are cases where degree intervals are specified rather than a single degree sequence. (A natural scenario where this problem arises is in hypothesis testing on social networks that are only partially observed.) Rechner, Strowick, and M\"uller-Hannemann introduced in 2018 the notion of degree interval Markov chain which uses three (separately well-studied) local operations (switch, hinge-flip and toggle), and employing on degree sequence realizations where any two sequences under scrutiny have very small coordinate-wise distance. Recently Amanatidis and Kleer published a beautiful paper (arXiv:2110.09068), showing that the degree interval Markov chain is rapidly mixing if the sequences are coming from a system of very thin intervals which are centered not far from a regular degree sequence. In this paper we extend substantially their result, showing that the degree interval Markov chain is rapidly mixing if the intervals are centred at P-stable degree sequences.
Since 2010, the output of a risk assessment tool that predicts how likely an individual is to commit severe violence against their partner has been integrated within the Basque country courtrooms. The EPV-R, the tool developed to assist police officers during the assessment of gender-based violence cases, was also incorporated to assist the decision-making of judges. With insufficient training, judges are exposed to an algorithmic output that influences the human decision of adopting measures in cases of gender-based violence. In this paper, we examine the risks, harms and limits of algorithmic governance within the context of gender-based violence. Through the lens of an Spanish judge exposed to this tool, we analyse how the EPV-R is impacting on the justice system. Moving beyond the risks of unfair and biased algorithmic outputs, we examine legal, social and technical pitfalls such as opaque implementation, efficiency's paradox and feedback loop, that could led to unintended consequences on women who suffer gender-based violence. Our interdisciplinary framework highlights the importance of understanding the impact and influence of risk assessment tools within judicial decision-making and increase awareness about its implementation in this context.
Applications of Reinforcement Learning (RL), in which agents learn to make a sequence of decisions despite lacking complete information about the latent states of the controlled system, that is, they act under partial observability of the states, are ubiquitous. Partially observable RL can be notoriously difficult -- well-known information-theoretic results show that learning partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) requires an exponential number of samples in the worst case. Yet, this does not rule out the existence of large subclasses of POMDPs over which learning is tractable. In this paper we identify such a subclass, which we call weakly revealing POMDPs. This family rules out the pathological instances of POMDPs where observations are uninformative to a degree that makes learning hard. We prove that for weakly revealing POMDPs, a simple algorithm combining optimism and Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) is sufficient to guarantee polynomial sample complexity. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first provably sample-efficient result for learning from interactions in overcomplete POMDPs, where the number of latent states can be larger than the number of observations.
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), commonly known as drones, are being increasingly deployed throughout the globe as a means to streamline monitoring, inspection, mapping, and logistic routines. When dispatched on autonomous missions, drones require an intelligent decision-making system for trajectory planning and tour optimization. Given the limited capacity of their onboard batteries, a key design challenge is to ensure the underlying algorithms can efficiently optimize the mission objectives along with recharging operations during long-haul flights. With this in view, the present work undertakes a comprehensive study on automated tour management systems for an energy-constrained drone: (1) We construct a machine learning model that estimates the energy expenditure of typical multi-rotor drones while accounting for real-world aspects and extrinsic meteorological factors. (2) Leveraging this model, the joint program of flight mission planning and recharging optimization is formulated as a multi-criteria Asymmetric Traveling Salesman Problem (ATSP), wherein a drone seeks for the time-optimal energy-feasible tour that visits all the target sites and refuels whenever necessary. (3) We devise an efficient approximation algorithm with provable worst-case performance guarantees and implement it in a drone management system, which supports real-time flight path tracking and re-computation in dynamic environments. (4) The effectiveness and practicality of the proposed approach are validated through extensive numerical simulations as well as real-world experiments.
Bayesian policy reuse (BPR) is a general policy transfer framework for selecting a source policy from an offline library by inferring the task belief based on some observation signals and a trained observation model. In this paper, we propose an improved BPR method to achieve more efficient policy transfer in deep reinforcement learning (DRL). First, most BPR algorithms use the episodic return as the observation signal that contains limited information and cannot be obtained until the end of an episode. Instead, we employ the state transition sample, which is informative and instantaneous, as the observation signal for faster and more accurate task inference. Second, BPR algorithms usually require numerous samples to estimate the probability distribution of the tabular-based observation model, which may be expensive and even infeasible to learn and maintain, especially when using the state transition sample as the signal. Hence, we propose a scalable observation model based on fitting state transition functions of source tasks from only a small number of samples, which can generalize to any signals observed in the target task. Moreover, we extend the offline-mode BPR to the continual learning setting by expanding the scalable observation model in a plug-and-play fashion, which can avoid negative transfer when faced with new unknown tasks. Experimental results show that our method can consistently facilitate faster and more efficient policy transfer.
We provide a decision theoretic analysis of bandit experiments. The setting corresponds to a dynamic programming problem, but solving this directly is typically infeasible. Working within the framework of diffusion asymptotics, we define suitable notions of asymptotic Bayes and minimax risk for bandit experiments. For normally distributed rewards, the minimal Bayes risk can be characterized as the solution to a nonlinear second-order partial differential equation (PDE). Using a limit of experiments approach, we show that this PDE characterization also holds asymptotically under both parametric and non-parametric distribution of the rewards. The approach further describes the state variables it is asymptotically sufficient to restrict attention to, and therefore suggests a practical strategy for dimension reduction. The upshot is that we can approximate the dynamic programming problem defining the bandit experiment with a PDE which can be efficiently solved using sparse matrix routines. We derive the optimal Bayes and minimax policies from the numerical solutions to these equations. The proposed policies substantially dominate existing methods such as Thompson sampling. The framework also allows for substantial generalizations to the bandit problem such as time discounting and pure exploration motives.
Natural language processing can facilitate the analysis of a person's mental state from text they have written. Previous studies have developed models that can predict whether a person is experiencing a mental health condition from social media posts with high accuracy. Yet, these models cannot explain why the person is experiencing a particular mental state. In this work, we present a new method for explaining a person's mental state from text using Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS). Our MCTS algorithm employs trained classification models to guide the search for key phrases that explain the writer's mental state in a concise, interpretable manner. Furthermore, our algorithm can find both explanations that depend on the particular context of the text (e.g., a recent breakup) and those that are context-independent. Using a dataset of Reddit posts that exhibit stress, we demonstrate the ability of our MCTS algorithm to identify interpretable explanations for a person's feeling of stress in both a context-dependent and context-independent manner.
As technology advances, the need for safe, efficient, and collaborative human-robot-teams has become increasingly important. One of the most fundamental collaborative tasks in any setting is the object handover. Human-to-robot handovers can take either of two approaches: (1) direct hand-to-hand or (2) indirect hand-to-placement-to-pick-up. The latter approach ensures minimal contact between the human and robot but can also result in increased idle time due to having to wait for the object to first be placed down on a surface. To minimize such idle time, the robot must preemptively predict the human intent of where the object will be placed. Furthermore, for the robot to preemptively act in any sort of productive manner, predictions and motion planning must occur in real-time. We introduce a novel prediction-planning pipeline that allows the robot to preemptively move towards the human agent's intended placement location using gaze and gestures as model inputs. In this paper, we investigate the performance and drawbacks of our early intent predictor-planner as well as the practical benefits of using such a pipeline through a human-robot case study.
Proactive dialogue system is able to lead the conversation to a goal topic and has advantaged potential in bargain, persuasion and negotiation. Current corpus-based learning manner limits its practical application in real-world scenarios. To this end, we contribute to advance the study of the proactive dialogue policy to a more natural and challenging setting, i.e., interacting dynamically with users. Further, we call attention to the non-cooperative user behavior -- the user talks about off-path topics when he/she is not satisfied with the previous topics introduced by the agent. We argue that the targets of reaching the goal topic quickly and maintaining a high user satisfaction are not always converge, because the topics close to the goal and the topics user preferred may not be the same. Towards this issue, we propose a new solution named I-Pro that can learn Proactive policy in the Interactive setting. Specifically, we learn the trade-off via a learned goal weight, which consists of four factors (dialogue turn, goal completion difficulty, user satisfaction estimation, and cooperative degree). The experimental results demonstrate I-Pro significantly outperforms baselines in terms of effectiveness and interpretability.