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Poster
Monte Carlo Value Iteration with Macro-Actions
Zhan Wei Lim · David Hsu · Wee Sun Lee

Mon Dec 12 10:00 AM -- 02:59 PM (PST) @
in Poster Session and Reception »

POMDP planning faces two major computational challenges: large state spaces and long planning horizons. The recently introduced Monte Carlo Value Iteration (MCVI) can tackle POMDPs with very large discrete state spaces or continuous state spaces, but its performance degrades when faced with long planning horizons. This paper presents Macro-MCVI, which extends MCVI by exploiting macro-actions for temporal abstraction. We provide sufficient conditions for Macro-MCVI to inherit the good theoretical properties of MCVI. Macro-MCVI does not require explicit construction of probabilistic models for macro-actions and is thus easy to apply in practice. Experiments show that Macro-MCVI substantially improves the performance of MCVI with suitable macro-actions.

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Author Information

Zhan Wei Lim (NUS)
David Hsu (National University of Singapore)
Wee Sun Lee (National University of Singapore)

Wee Sun Lee is a professor in the Department of Computer Science, National University of Singapore. He obtained his B.Eng from the University of Queensland in 1992 and his Ph.D. from the Australian National University in 1996. He has been a research fellow at the Australian Defence Force Academy, a fellow of the Singapore-MIT Alliance, and a visiting scientist at MIT. His research interests include machine learning, planning under uncertainty, and approximate inference. His works have won the Test of Time Award at Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) 2021, the RoboCup Best Paper Award at International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) 2015, the Google Best Student Paper Award, Uncertainty in AI (UAI) 2014 (as faculty co-author), as well as several competitions and challenges. He has been an area chair for machine learning and AI conferences such as the Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), and the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI). He was a program, conference and journal track co-chair for the Asian Conference on Machine Learning (ACML), and he is currently the co-chair of the steering committee of ACML.

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