Prince Mathew

2papers

2 Papers

3.6AIMay 14
Synthesizing POMDP Policies: Sampling Meets Model-checking via Learning

Debraj Chakraborty, Anirban Majumdar, Prince Mathew et al.

Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) are the standard framework for decision-making under uncertainty. While sampling-based methods scale well, they lack formal correctness guarantees, making them unsuitable for safety-critical applications. Conversely, formal synthesis techniques provide correctness-by-construction but often struggle with scalability, as general POMDP synthesis is undecidable. To bridge this gap, we propose a synthesis framework that integrates sampling, automata learning, and model-checking. Inspired by Angluin's $L^*$ algorithm, our approach utilizes sampling as a membership oracle and model-checking as an equivalence oracle. This enables the synthesis of finite-state controllers with formal guarantees, provided the sampling-induced policy is regular. We establish a relative completeness result for this framework. Experimental results from our prototypical implementation demonstrate that this method successfully solves threshold-safety problems that remain challenging for existing formal synthesis tools. We believe our algorithm serves as a valuable component in a portfolio approach to tackling the inherent difficulty of POMDP synthesis problems.

10.0FLMay 7
Edit Distance of Finite-Valued Transducers

Prince Mathew, Saina Sunny

Transducers generalise automata by producing output word(s) for each input word, thereby defining a relation over words. A transducer is said to be finite-valued if, for every input word, it produces at most $k$ output words, for some constant $k$. If $k = 1$, then the transducer is said to be functional. The edit distance between two transducers is the minimal number of edits required to transform every output of one transducer into some output of the other, for each input word. This notion has been studied for functional transducers, where it is shown to be computable. However, it is uncomputable for transducers in general. In this work, we show the computability of the edit distance of finite-valued transducers, a class that is strictly more expressive than functional transducers.