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International Conference on Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems

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Under-Approximating Expected Total Rewards in POMDPs

Under-Approximating Expected Total Rewards in POMDPs

  • Alexander Bork  ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-7026-228X10,
  • Joost-Pieter Katoen  ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-6143-192610 &
  • Tim Quatmann  ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-2843-551110 
  • Conference paper
  • Open Access
  • First Online: 30 March 2022

  • 2327 Accesses

  • 2 Citations

Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNCS,volume 13244)

Abstract

We consider the problem: is the optimal expected total reward to reach a goal state in a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) below a given threshold? We tackle this—generally undecidable—problem by computing under-approximations on these total expected rewards. This is done by abstracting finite unfoldings of the infinite belief MDP of the POMDP. The key issue is to find a suitable under-approximation of the value function. We provide two techniques: a simple (cut-off) technique that uses a good policy on the POMDP, and a more advanced technique (belief clipping) that uses minimal shifts of probabilities between beliefs. We use mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) to find such minimal probability shifts and experimentally show that our techniques scale quite well while providing tight lower bounds on the expected total reward.

This work is funded by the DFG RTG 2236 “UnRAVeL”.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany

    Alexander Bork, Joost-Pieter Katoen & Tim Quatmann

Authors
  1. Alexander Bork
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  2. Joost-Pieter Katoen
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  3. Tim Quatmann
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Correspondence to Alexander Bork .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Be’er Sheva, Israel

    Dr. Dana Fisman

  2. University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA

    Grigore Rosu

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Bork, A., Katoen, JP., Quatmann, T. (2022). Under-Approximating Expected Total Rewards in POMDPs. In: Fisman, D., Rosu, G. (eds) Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems. TACAS 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13244. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99527-0_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99527-0_2

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