Conditional Deep Generative Models for Belief State Planning

Abstract: Partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) are used to model a wide range of applications, including robotics, autonomous vehicles, and subsurface problems. However, accurately representing the belief is difficult for POMDPs with high-dimensional states. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that uses conditional deep generative models (cDGMs) to represent the belief. Unlike traditional belief representations, cDGMs are well-suited for high-dimensional states and large numbers of observations, and they can generate an arbitrary number of samples from the posterior belief. We train the cDGMs on data produced by random rollout trajectories and show their effectiveness in solving a mineral exploration POMDP with a large and continuous state space. The cDGMs outperform particle filter baselines in both task-agnostic measures of belief accuracy as well as in planning performance.