10 accepted papers
Continuous time systems are often modeled using discrete time dynamics but this requires a small simulation step to maintain accuracy. In turn, this requires a large planning horizon which leads to computationally demanding planning problems and reduced performance. Previous work in model-free reinf…
Gaussian Process (GP) models are widely used for Robotic Information Gathering (RIG) in exploring unknown environments due to their ability to model complex phenomena with non-parametric flexibility and accurately quantify prediction uncertainty. Previous work has developed informative planners and…
The paper introduces DiSProD, an online planner developed for environments with probabilistic transitions in continuous state and action spaces. DiSProD builds a symbolic graph that captures the distribution of future trajectories, conditioned on a given policy, using independence assumptions an…
Robotic Information Gathering (RIG) relies on the uncertainty of a probabilistic model to identify critical areas for efficient data collection. Gaussian processes (GPs) with stationary kernels have been widely adopted for spatial modeling. However, real-world spatial data typically does not satisfy…
The paper provides a thorough investigation of Direct Loss Minimization (DLM), which optimizes the posterior to minimize predictive loss, in sparse Gaussian processes. For the conjugate case, we consider DLM for log-loss and DLM for square loss showing a significant performance improvement in both c…
The paper introduces a new algorithm for planning in partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDP) based on the idea of aggregate simulation. The algorithm uses product distributions to approximate the belief state and shows how to build a representation graph of an approximate action-value…
It is well known that the problems of stochastic planning and probabilistic inference are closely related. This paper makes two contributions in this context. The first is to provide an analysis of the recently developed SOGBOFA heuristic planning algorithm that was shown to be effective for problem…
Bayesian models are established as one of the main successful paradigms for complex problems in machine learning. To handle intractable inference, research in this area has developed new approximation methods that are fast and effective. However, theoretical analysis of the performance of such appro…
Latent Gaussian Models (LGM) provide a rich modeling framework with general inference procedures. The variational approximation offers an effective solution for such models and has attracted a significant amount of interest. Recent work proposed a fixed-point (FP) update procedure to optimize the co…
Gaussian processes (GP) provide an attractive machine learning model due to their non-parametric form, their flexibility to capture many types of observation data, and their generic inference procedures. Sparse GP inference algorithms address the cubic complexity of GPs by focusing on a small set of…