Approximate Inference for Stochastic Planning in Factored Spaces

Stochastic planning can be reduced to probabilistic inference in large discrete graphical models, but hardness of inference requires approximation schemes to be used. In this paper we argue that such applications can be disentangled along two dimensions. The first is the direction of information flow in the idealized exact optimization objective, i.e., forward vs. backward inference. The second is the type of approximation used to calculate solutions for this objective, e.g., Belief Propagation (BP) vs. mean field variational inference (MFVI). This new categorization allows us to unify a large amount of isolated efforts in prior work explaining their connections and differences as well as potential improvements. An extensive experimental evaluation over large stochastic planning problems shows the advantage of forward BP over several algorithms based on MFVI. An analysis of practical limitations of MFVI motivates a novel algorithm, CSVI, which provides a tighter variational approximation and achieves comparable planning performance with forward BP.