Active sensing for continuous state and action spaces via task-action entropy minimization

Abstract

In this paper, a new task-oriented active-sensing method is presented. Most active sensing methods choose sensing actions that minimize the uncertainty of the state according to some information-theoretic measure. While this is reasonable for most applications, minimizing state uncertainty may not be most relevant when the state information is used to perform a task. This is because the uncertainty in some subspace of the state space could have more impact on the performance of the task than the others at a given time. The active-sensing method presented in this paper takes the task into account when selecting sensing actions by minimizing the uncertainty in future task action.