Optimal cost almost-sure reachability in POMDPs

Abstract

We consider partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) with a set of target states and an integer cost associated with every transition. The optimization objective we study asks to minimize the expected total cost of reaching a state in the target set, while ensuring that the target set is reached almost surely (with probability 1). We show that for integer costs approximating the optimal cost is undecidable. For positive costs, our results are as follows: (i) we establish matching lower and upper bounds for the optimal cost, both double exponential in the POMDP state space size; (ii) we show that the problem of approximating the optimal cost is decidable and present approximation algorithms developing on the existing algorithms for POMDPs with finite-horizon objectives. While the worst-case running time of our algorithm is double exponential, we also present efficient stopping criteria for the algorithm and show experimentally that it performs well in many examples of interest