Lifted Stochastic Planning, Belief Propagation and Marginal MAP

Hao Cui, Roni Khardon

Abstract: It is well known that the problems of stochastic planning and probabilistic inference are closely related. This paper makes several contributions in this context for factored spaces where the complexity of solutions is challenging. First, we analyze the recently developed SOGBOFA heuristic, which performs stochastic planning by building an explicit computation graph capturing an approximate aggregate simulation of the dynamics. It is shown that the values computed by this algorithm are identical to the approximation provided by Belief Propagation (BP). Second, as a consequence of this observation, we show how ideas on lifted BP can be used to develop a lifted version of SOGBOFA. Unlike implementations of lifted BP, Lifted SOGBOFA has a very simple implementation as a dynamic programming version of the original graph construction. Third, we show that the idea of graph construction for aggregate simulation can be used to solve marginal MAP (MMAP) problems in Bayesian networks, where MAP variables are constrained to be at roots of the network. This yields a novel algorithm for MMAP for this subclass. An experimental evaluation illustrates the advantage of Lifted SOGBOFA for planning.