Stanford
University
  • Stanford Home
  • Maps & Directions
  • Search Stanford
  • Emergency Info
  • Terms of Use
  • Privacy
  • Copyright
  • Trademarks
  • Non-Discrimination
  • Accessibility
© Stanford University.  Stanford, California 94305.
Anthony Corso | Stanford HAI

Stay Up To Date

Get the latest news, advances in research, policy work, and education program updates from HAI in your inbox weekly.

Sign Up For Latest News

Navigate
  • About
  • Events
  • Careers
  • Search
Participate
  • Get Involved
  • Support HAI
  • Contact Us
Skip to content
  • About

    • About
    • People
    • Get Involved with HAI
    • Support HAI
  • Research

    • Research
    • Fellowship Programs
    • Grants
    • Student Affinity Groups
    • Centers & Labs
    • Research Publications
    • Research Partners
  • Education

    • Education
    • Executive and Professional Education
    • Government and Policymakers
    • K-12
    • Stanford Students
  • Policy

    • Policy
    • Policy Publications
    • Policymaker Education
    • Student Opportunities
  • AI Index

    • AI Index
    • AI Index Report
    • Global Vibrancy Tool
    • People
  • News
  • Events
  • Industry
  • Centers & Labs
people

Anthony Corso

Postdoctoral Scholar, Stanford HAI

Latest Work
BetaZero: Belief-State Planning for Long-Horizon POMDPs Using Learned Approximations
Anthony Corso, Mykel Kochenderfer, Jef Caers, Robert J. Moss
Jul 31
Research
Your browser does not support the video tag.

Real-world planning problems, including autonomous driving and sustainable energy applications like carbon storage and resource exploration, have recently been modeled as partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) and solved using approximate methods. To solve high-dimensional POMDPs in practice, state- of-the-art methods use online planning with problem-specific heuristics to reduce planning horizons and make the problems tractable. Algorithms that learn approximations to replace heuristics have recently found success in large-scale fully observable domains. The key insight is the combination of online Monte Carlo tree search with offline neural network approximations of the optimal policy and value function. In this work, we bring this insight to partially observable domains and propose BetaZero, a belief-state planning algorithm for high-dimensional POMDPs. BetaZero learns offline approximations that replace heuristics to enable online decision making in long-horizon problems. We address several challenges inherent in large-scale partially observable domains; namely challenges of transitioning in stochastic environments, prioritizing action branching with a limited search bud- get, and representing beliefs as input to the network. To formalize the use of all limited search information, we train against a novel Q-weighted visit counts policy. We test BetaZero on various well-established POMDP benchmarks found in the literature and a real-world problem of critical mineral exploration. Experiments show that BetaZero outperforms state-of-the-art POMDP solvers on a variety of tasks.1

Share
Link copied to clipboard!