Information-guided Planning: An Online Approach for Partially Observable Problems

Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36 (NeurIPS 2023) Main Conference Track

Bibtex Paper Supplemental

Authors

Matheus Aparecido Do Carmo Alves, Amokh Varma, Yehia Elkhatib, Leandro Soriano Marcolino

Abstract

This paper presents IB-POMCP, a novel algorithm for online planning under partial observability. Our approach enhances the decision-making process by using estimations of the world belief's entropy to guide a tree search process and surpass the limitations of planning in scenarios with sparse reward configurations. By performing what we denominate as an information-guided planning process, the algorithm, which incorporates a novel I-UCB function, shows significant improvements in reward and reasoning time compared to state-of-the-art baselines in several benchmark scenarios, along with theoretical convergence guarantees.