arXiv AI

Planning under Distribution Shifts with Causal POMDPs

arXiv:2602. 23545v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In the real world, planning is often challenged by distribution shifts.

arXiv AI
Sep 15

A note on goal-based hierarchical RL

The paper discusses the agent-centric general value function (ACGVF) framework, which allows an agent to decide both which goal to pursue and when to consider a goal finished, beyond merely selecting actions. It notes that ACGVF assumes full observability, while a prior approach used an internal belief state but required externally supplied goals. The note proposes to unify and extend these methods using hierarchical hidden Markov models (HHMMs).

By Kevin Murphy
arXiv AI
Aug 20

Interval POMDP Shielding for Imperfect-Perception Agents

The paper introduces Interval POMDP Shielding for agents with imperfect perception, aiming to prevent unsafe actions when sensor readings may be misclassified. By estimating perception uncertainty from finite labeled data, the authors construct confidence intervals and model the system as a finite Interval Partially Observable Markov Decision Process. They propose an algorithm that computes a conservative belief set, enabling a runtime shield that guarantees, with high probability, that any action allowed by the shield meets a specified safety lower bound. Experiments on four case studies demonstrate that this shielding approach outperforms state‑of‑the‑art baselines in safety.

By William Scarbro, Ravi Mangal
arXiv AI
Sep 11

Belief-State Engine: Augmenting LLMs for Principled Planning Under Partial Observability

The paper introduces the Belief-State Engine (BSE), an inference module that supplies a large language model (LLM) with a Bayesian posterior over hidden states in a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP). By keeping the raw action‑observation log hidden from the LLM, the BSE ensures the agent behaves as a sound Markov policy on the belief MDP, thereby inheriting classical POMDP optimality guarantees. Experiments on the Tiger POMDP and a red‑team attack‑graph task show that BSE‑augmented agents outperform six baselines in task return, belief calibration, and decision consistency.

By Arnab Chattopadhayay, Debdipta Halder
arXiv AI
Jun 16

PO-PDDL: Learning Symbolic POMDPs from Visual Demonstrations for Robot Planning Under Uncertainty

arXiv:2606. 15654v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Real-world robot task planning must operate under both stochastic action execution and partial observability, yet constructing Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) models for real robotics domains remains difficult and labor-intensive.

By Wenjing Tang, Xuanjin Jin, Yuan Liu, Renming Huang, Cewu Lu, Panpan Cai