Applying metric trees to belief-point POMDPs.

J. Pineau, G. Gordon, and S. Thrun.

Recent developments in grid-based and point-based approximation algorithms for POMDPs have greatly improved the tractability of POMDP planning. These approaches operate on sets of belief points by individually learning a value function for each point. In reality, belief points exist in a highly-structured metric simplex, but current POMDP algorithms do not exploit this property. This paper presents a new metric-tree algorithm which can be used in the context of POMDP planning to sort belief points spatially, and then perform fast value function updates over groups of points. We present results showing that this approach can reduce computation in point-based POMDP algorithms for a wide range of problems.

The full paper is available in PDF and gzipped Postscript

@INPROCEEDINGS{Pineau03c,
  AUTHOR	= {J. Pineau and G. Gordon and S. Thrun},
  TITLE		= {Applying Metric Trees to Belief-Point {POMDP}s},
  YEAR		= {2003},
  BOOKTITLE	= {Proceedings of Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS)},
  EDITOR	= {S. Thrun and L. Saul and B. Sch\"{o}lkopf},
  PUBLISHER	= {MIT Press}
}