DualSMC: Tunneling Differentiable Filtering and Planning under Continuous POMDPs

DualSMC: Tunneling Differentiable Filtering and Planning under Continuous POMDPs

Yunbo Wang, Bo Liu, Jiajun Wu, Yuke Zhu, Simon S. Du, Li Fei-Fei, Joshua B. Tenenbaum

Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main track. Pages 4190-4198. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2020/579

A major difficulty of solving continuous POMDPs is to infer the multi-modal distribution of the unobserved true states and to make the planning algorithm dependent on the perceived uncertainty. We cast POMDP filtering and planning problems as two closely related Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) processes, one over the real states and the other over the future optimal trajectories, and combine the merits of these two parts in a new model named the DualSMC network. In particular, we first introduce an adversarial particle filter that leverages the adversarial relationship between its internal components. Based on the filtering results, we then propose a planning algorithm that extends the previous SMC planning approach [Piche et al., 2018] to continuous POMDPs with an uncertainty-dependent policy. Crucially, not only can DualSMC handle complex observations such as image input but also it remains highly interpretable. It is shown to be effective in three continuous POMDP domains: the floor positioning domain, the 3D light-dark navigation domain, and a modified Reacher domain.
Keywords:
Planning and Scheduling: Planning Algorithms
Planning and Scheduling: Planning under Uncertainty
Planning and Scheduling: Planning with Incomplete information