Planning under partial observability is one of the most significant and challenging planning problems. It has been

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We investigate the computability of problems in probabilistic planning and partially observable infinite-horizon Markov decision processes. The undecidability of the string-existence problem for probabilistic finite automata is adapted to show that the following problem of plan existence in probabilistic planning is undecidable: given a probabilistic planning problem, determine whether there exists a plan with success probability exceeding a desirable threshold. Analogous policy-existence problems for partially observable infinite-horizon Markov decision processes under discounted and undiscounted total reward models, average-reward models, and state-avoidance models are all shown to be undecidable. The results apply to corresponding approximation problems as well. 1 Introduction We show that problems in probabilistic planning (Kushmerick, Hanks, & Weld 1995; Boutilier, Dean, & Hanks 1999) and infinite-horizon partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) (L...

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Automated planning, the problem of how an agent achieves a goal given a repertoire of actions, is one of the foundational and most widely studied problems in the AI literature. The original formulation of the problem makes strong assumptions regarding the agent's knowledge and control over the world, namely that its information is complete and correct, and that the results of its actions are deterministic and known.

We show that for conditional planning with partial observability the problem of testing existence of plans with success probability 1 is 2-EXP-complete. This result completes the complexity picture for non-probabilistic propositional planning. We also give new proofs for the EXP-hardness of conditional planning with full observability and the EXPSPACE-hardness of conditional planning without observability. The proofs demonstrate how lack of full observability allows the encoding of exponential space Turing machines in the planning problem, and how the necessity to have branching in plans corresponds to the move to a complexity class defined in terms of alternation from the corresponding deterministic complexity class. Lack of full observability necessitates the use of beliefs states, the number of which is exponential in the number of states, and alternation corresponds to the choices a branching plan can make.

MAP is the problem of finding a most probable instantiation of a set of variables in a Bayesian network, given some evidence. MAP appears

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MAP is the problem of finding a most probable instantiation of a set of variables given evidence. MAP has always been perceived to be significantly harder than the related problems of computing the probability of a variable instantiation (Pr), or the problem of computing the most probable explanation (MPE). This paper investigates the complexity of MAP in Bayesian networks. Specifically, we show that MAP is complete for NP PP and provide further negative complexity results for algorithms based on variable elimination. We also show that MAP remains hard even when MPE and Pr become easy. For example, we show that MAP is NP-complete when the networks are restricted to polytrees, and even then can not be effectively approximated. Given the difficulty of computing MAP exactly, and the difficulty of approximating MAP while providing useful guarantees on the resulting approximation, we investigate best effort approximations. We introduce a generic MAP approximation framework. We provide two instantiations of the framework; one for networks which are amenable to exact inference (Pr), and one for networks for which even exact inference is too hard. This allows MAP approximation on networks that are too complex to even exactly solve the easier problems, Pr and MPE. Experimental results indicate that using these approximation algorithms provides much better solutions than standard techniques, and provide accurate MAP estimates in many cases. 1.

The current best conformant probabilistic planners encode the problem as a bounded length CSP or SAT problem. While these approaches can find optimal solutions for given plan lengths, they often do not scale for large problems or plan lengths. As has been shown in classical planning, heuristic search outperforms CSP/SAT techniques (especially when a plan length is not given a priori). The problem with applying heuristic search in probabilistic planning is that effective heuristics are as yet lacking. In this work, we apply heuristic search to conformant probabilistic planning by adapting planning graph heuristics developed for non-deterministic planning. We evaluate a straight-forward application of these planning graph techniques, which amounts to exactly computing the distribution over reachable relaxed planning graph layers. Computing these distributions is costly, so we apply Sequential Monte Carlo to approximate them. We demonstrate on several domains how our approach enables our planner to far out-scale existing (optimal) probabilistic planners and still find reasonable quality solutions.