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Unpublished Paper
Anytime Planning for Decentralized POMDPs using Expectation Maximization
Proceedings of the Twenty-Sixth Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI) (2010)
  • Akshat Kumar
  • Shlomo Zilberstein, University of Massachusetts - Amherst
Abstract
Decentralized POMDPs provide an expressive framework for multi-agent sequential decision making. While finite-horizon DEC-POMDPs have enjoyed significant success, progress remains slow for the infinite-horizon case mainly due to the inherent complexity of optimizing stochastic controllers representing agent policies. We present a promising new class of algorithms for the infinite-horizon case, which recasts the optimization problem as inference in a mixture of DBNs. An attractive feature of this approach is the straightforward adoption of existing inference techniques in DBNs for solving DEC-POMDPs and supporting richer representations such as factored or continuous states and actions. We also derive the Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm to optimize the joint policy represented as DBNs. Experiments on benchmark domains show that EM compares favorably against the state-of-the-art solvers.
Disciplines
Publication Date
2010
Comments
This is the pre-published version harvested from arXiv.
Citation Information
Akshat Kumar and Shlomo Zilberstein. "Anytime Planning for Decentralized POMDPs using Expectation Maximization" Proceedings of the Twenty-Sixth Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI) (2010)
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/shlomo_zilberstein/1/