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Anthony R. Cassandra

Bio: Anthony R. Cassandra is an academic researcher from Brown University. The author has contributed to research in topics: Partially observable Markov decision process & Markov decision process. The author has an hindex of 14, co-authored 16 publications receiving 6990 citations.

Papers
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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: A novel algorithm for solving pomdps off line and how, in some cases, a finite-memory controller can be extracted from the solution to a POMDP is outlined.

4,283 citations

Proceedings Article
01 Aug 1994
TL;DR: The existing algorithms for computing optimal control strategies for partially observable stochastic environments are found to be highly computationally inefficient and a new algorithm is developed that is empirically more efficient.
Abstract: In this paper, we describe the partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) approach to finding optimal or near-optimal control strategies for partially observable stochastic environments, given a complete model of the environment. The POMDP approach was originally developed in the operations research community and provides a formal basis for planning problems that have been of interest to the AI community. We found the existing algorithms for computing optimal control strategies to be highly computationally inefficient and have developed a new algorithm that is empirically more efficient. We sketch this algorithm and present preliminary results on several small problems that illustrate important properties of the POMDP approach.

699 citations

Book ChapterDOI
01 Oct 1997
TL;DR: This paper discusses several simple solution methods and shows that all are capable of finding near- optimal policies for a selection of extremely small POMDP'S taken from the learning literature, but shows that none are able to solve a slightly larger and noisier problem based on robot navigation.
Abstract: Partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDP's) model decision problems in which an agent tries to maximize its reward in the face of limited and/or noisy sensor feedback. While the study of POMDP's is motivated by a need to address realistic problems, existing techniques for finding optimal behavior do not appear to scale well and have been unable to find satisfactory policies for problems with more than a dozen states. After a brief review of POMDP's, this paper discusses several simple solution methods and shows that all are capable of finding near- optimal policies for a selection of extremely small POMDP'S taken from the learning literature. In contrast, we show that none are able to solve a slightly larger and noisier problem based on robot navigation. We find that a combination of two novel approaches performs well on these problems and suggest methods for scaling to even larger and more complicated domains.

663 citations

Proceedings ArticleDOI
01 May 1996
TL;DR: The optimal solution to the problem of how actions should be chosen is presented, formulated as a partially observable Markov decision process, which goes on to explore a variety of heuristic control strategies.
Abstract: Discrete Bayesian models have been used to model uncertainty for mobile-robot navigation, but the question of how actions should be chosen remains largely unexplored. This paper presents the optimal solution to the problem, formulated as a partially observable Markov decision process. Since solving for the optimal control policy is intractable, in general, it goes on to explore a variety of heuristic control strategies. The control strategies are compared experimentally, both in simulation and in runs on a robot.

549 citations

Proceedings Article
01 Aug 1997
TL;DR: It is found that incremental pruning is presently the most efficient exact method for solving POMDPS.
Abstract: Most exact algorithms for general partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) use a form of dynamic programming in which a piecewise-linear and convex representation of one value function is transformed into another. We examine variations of the "incremental pruning" method for solving this problem and compare them to earlier algorithms from theoretical and empirical perspectives. We find that incremental pruning is presently the most efficient exact method for solving POMDPS.

441 citations


Cited by
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Journal ArticleDOI
26 Feb 2015-Nature
TL;DR: This work bridges the divide between high-dimensional sensory inputs and actions, resulting in the first artificial agent that is capable of learning to excel at a diverse array of challenging tasks.
Abstract: The theory of reinforcement learning provides a normative account, deeply rooted in psychological and neuroscientific perspectives on animal behaviour, of how agents may optimize their control of an environment. To use reinforcement learning successfully in situations approaching real-world complexity, however, agents are confronted with a difficult task: they must derive efficient representations of the environment from high-dimensional sensory inputs, and use these to generalize past experience to new situations. Remarkably, humans and other animals seem to solve this problem through a harmonious combination of reinforcement learning and hierarchical sensory processing systems, the former evidenced by a wealth of neural data revealing notable parallels between the phasic signals emitted by dopaminergic neurons and temporal difference reinforcement learning algorithms. While reinforcement learning agents have achieved some successes in a variety of domains, their applicability has previously been limited to domains in which useful features can be handcrafted, or to domains with fully observed, low-dimensional state spaces. Here we use recent advances in training deep neural networks to develop a novel artificial agent, termed a deep Q-network, that can learn successful policies directly from high-dimensional sensory inputs using end-to-end reinforcement learning. We tested this agent on the challenging domain of classic Atari 2600 games. We demonstrate that the deep Q-network agent, receiving only the pixels and the game score as inputs, was able to surpass the performance of all previous algorithms and achieve a level comparable to that of a professional human games tester across a set of 49 games, using the same algorithm, network architecture and hyperparameters. This work bridges the divide between high-dimensional sensory inputs and actions, resulting in the first artificial agent that is capable of learning to excel at a diverse array of challenging tasks.

23,074 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This historical survey compactly summarizes relevant work, much of it from the previous millennium, review deep supervised learning, unsupervised learning, reinforcement learning & evolutionary computation, and indirect search for short programs encoding deep and large networks.

14,635 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Machine learning addresses many of the same research questions as the fields of statistics, data mining, and psychology, but with differences of emphasis.
Abstract: Machine Learning is the study of methods for programming computers to learn. Computers are applied to a wide range of tasks, and for most of these it is relatively easy for programmers to design and implement the necessary software. However, there are many tasks for which this is difficult or impossible. These can be divided into four general categories. First, there are problems for which there exist no human experts. For example, in modern automated manufacturing facilities, there is a need to predict machine failures before they occur by analyzing sensor readings. Because the machines are new, there are no human experts who can be interviewed by a programmer to provide the knowledge necessary to build a computer system. A machine learning system can study recorded data and subsequent machine failures and learn prediction rules. Second, there are problems where human experts exist, but where they are unable to explain their expertise. This is the case in many perceptual tasks, such as speech recognition, hand-writing recognition, and natural language understanding. Virtually all humans exhibit expert-level abilities on these tasks, but none of them can describe the detailed steps that they follow as they perform them. Fortunately, humans can provide machines with examples of the inputs and correct outputs for these tasks, so machine learning algorithms can learn to map the inputs to the outputs. Third, there are problems where phenomena are changing rapidly. In finance, for example, people would like to predict the future behavior of the stock market, of consumer purchases, or of exchange rates. These behaviors change frequently, so that even if a programmer could construct a good predictive computer program, it would need to be rewritten frequently. A learning program can relieve the programmer of this burden by constantly modifying and tuning a set of learned prediction rules. Fourth, there are applications that need to be customized for each computer user separately. Consider, for example, a program to filter unwanted electronic mail messages. Different users will need different filters. It is unreasonable to expect each user to program his or her own rules, and it is infeasible to provide every user with a software engineer to keep the rules up-to-date. A machine learning system can learn which mail messages the user rejects and maintain the filtering rules automatically. Machine learning addresses many of the same research questions as the fields of statistics, data mining, and psychology, but with differences of emphasis. Statistics focuses on understanding the phenomena that have generated the data, often with the goal of testing different hypotheses about those phenomena. Data mining seeks to find patterns in the data that are understandable by people. Psychological studies of human learning aspire to understand the mechanisms underlying the various learning behaviors exhibited by people (concept learning, skill acquisition, strategy change, etc.).

13,246 citations

Book
24 Aug 2012
TL;DR: This textbook offers a comprehensive and self-contained introduction to the field of machine learning, based on a unified, probabilistic approach, and is suitable for upper-level undergraduates with an introductory-level college math background and beginning graduate students.
Abstract: Today's Web-enabled deluge of electronic data calls for automated methods of data analysis. Machine learning provides these, developing methods that can automatically detect patterns in data and then use the uncovered patterns to predict future data. This textbook offers a comprehensive and self-contained introduction to the field of machine learning, based on a unified, probabilistic approach. The coverage combines breadth and depth, offering necessary background material on such topics as probability, optimization, and linear algebra as well as discussion of recent developments in the field, including conditional random fields, L1 regularization, and deep learning. The book is written in an informal, accessible style, complete with pseudo-code for the most important algorithms. All topics are copiously illustrated with color images and worked examples drawn from such application domains as biology, text processing, computer vision, and robotics. Rather than providing a cookbook of different heuristic methods, the book stresses a principled model-based approach, often using the language of graphical models to specify models in a concise and intuitive way. Almost all the models described have been implemented in a MATLAB software package--PMTK (probabilistic modeling toolkit)--that is freely available online. The book is suitable for upper-level undergraduates with an introductory-level college math background and beginning graduate students.

8,059 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Central issues of reinforcement learning are discussed, including trading off exploration and exploitation, establishing the foundations of the field via Markov decision theory, learning from delayed reinforcement, constructing empirical models to accelerate learning, making use of generalization and hierarchy, and coping with hidden state.
Abstract: This paper surveys the field of reinforcement learning from a computer-science perspective. It is written to be accessible to researchers familiar with machine learning. Both the historical basis of the field and a broad selection of current work are summarized. Reinforcement learning is the problem faced by an agent that learns behavior through trial-and-error interactions with a dynamic environment. The work described here has a resemblance to work in psychology, but differs considerably in the details and in the use of the word "reinforcement." The paper discusses central issues of reinforcement learning, including trading off exploration and exploitation, establishing the foundations of the field via Markov decision theory, learning from delayed reinforcement, constructing empirical models to accelerate learning, making use of generalization and hierarchy, and coping with hidden state. It concludes with a survey of some implemented systems and an assessment of the practical utility of current methods for reinforcement learning.

6,895 citations