Online Planning in POMDPs with Self-Improving Simulators

Online Planning in POMDPs with Self-Improving Simulators

Jinke He, Miguel Suau, Hendrik Baier, Michael Kaisers, Frans A. Oliehoek

Proceedings of the Thirty-First International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 4628-4634. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2022/642

How can we plan efficiently in a large and complex environment when the time budget is limited? Given the original simulator of the environment, which may be computationally very demanding, we propose to learn online an approximate but much faster simulator that improves over time. To plan reliably and efficiently while the approximate simulator is learning, we develop a method that adaptively decides which simulator to use for every simulation, based on a statistic that measures the accuracy of the approximate simulator. This allows us to use the approximate simulator to replace the original simulator for faster simulations when it is accurate enough under the current context, thus trading off simulation speed and accuracy. Experimental results in two large domains show that when integrated with POMCP, our approach allows to plan with improving efficiency over time.
Keywords:
Planning and Scheduling: Planning under Uncertainty
Planning and Scheduling: Planning Algorithms
Planning and Scheduling: POMDPs
Planning and Scheduling: Real-time Planning