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Main Authors: Parthasarathy, Dinesh, Kontes, Georgios, Plinge, Axel, Mutschler, Christopher
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.16209
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author Parthasarathy, Dinesh
Kontes, Georgios
Plinge, Axel
Mutschler, Christopher
author_facet Parthasarathy, Dinesh
Kontes, Georgios
Plinge, Axel
Mutschler, Christopher
contents The Constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP) formulation allows to solve safety-critical decision making tasks that are subject to constraints. While CMDPs have been extensively studied in the Reinforcement Learning literature, little attention has been given to sampling-based planning algorithms such as MCTS for solving them. Previous approaches perform conservatively with respect to costs as they avoid constraint violations by using Monte Carlo cost estimates that suffer from high variance. We propose Constrained MCTS (C-MCTS), which estimates cost using a safety critic that is trained with Temporal Difference learning in an offline phase prior to agent deployment. The critic limits exploration by pruning unsafe trajectories within MCTS during deployment. C-MCTS satisfies cost constraints but operates closer to the constraint boundary, achieving higher rewards than previous work. As a nice byproduct, the planner is more efficient w.r.t. planning steps. Most importantly, under model mismatch between the planner and the real world, C-MCTS is less susceptible to cost violations than previous work.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2305_16209
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle C-MCTS: Safe Planning with Monte Carlo Tree Search
Parthasarathy, Dinesh
Kontes, Georgios
Plinge, Axel
Mutschler, Christopher
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
The Constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP) formulation allows to solve safety-critical decision making tasks that are subject to constraints. While CMDPs have been extensively studied in the Reinforcement Learning literature, little attention has been given to sampling-based planning algorithms such as MCTS for solving them. Previous approaches perform conservatively with respect to costs as they avoid constraint violations by using Monte Carlo cost estimates that suffer from high variance. We propose Constrained MCTS (C-MCTS), which estimates cost using a safety critic that is trained with Temporal Difference learning in an offline phase prior to agent deployment. The critic limits exploration by pruning unsafe trajectories within MCTS during deployment. C-MCTS satisfies cost constraints but operates closer to the constraint boundary, achieving higher rewards than previous work. As a nice byproduct, the planner is more efficient w.r.t. planning steps. Most importantly, under model mismatch between the planner and the real world, C-MCTS is less susceptible to cost violations than previous work.
title C-MCTS: Safe Planning with Monte Carlo Tree Search
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.16209