Efficient Exploitation of Factored Domains in Bayesian Reinforcement Learning for POMDPs

Abstract

While the POMDP has proven to be a powerful framework to model and solve partially observable stochastic problems, it assumes ac- curate and complete knowledge of the environment. When such information is not available, as is the case in many real world appli- cations, one must learn such a model. The BA-POMDP considers the model as part of the hidden state and explicitly considers the uncertainty over it, and as a result transforms the learning problem into a planning problem. This model, however, grows exponentially with the underlying POMDP size, and becomes intractable for non- trivial problems. In this article we propose a factored framework, the FBA-POMDP that represents the model as a Bayes-Net, dras- tically decreasing the number of parameters required to describe the dynamics of the environment. We demonstrate that the our ap- proach allows solvers to tackle problems much larger than possible in the BA-POMDP.