Vulcan: A Monte Carlo Algorithm for Large Chance Constrained MDPs with Risk Bounding Functions
This addresses the problem of scalable risk-aware planning in AI and robotics for applications with dangerous outcomes, offering a significant speedup over prior methods.
The paper tackles the challenge of solving large Chance Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CCMDPs), which are difficult due to coupled state dependencies, by introducing a constraint that decouples states and enabling efficient Monte Carlo Tree Search. The result is Vulcan, an algorithm that runs tens to hundreds of times faster than existing methods, with mean suboptimality of a few percent, and solves a problem with over 10^13 states in 3 minutes.
Chance Constrained Markov Decision Processes maximize reward subject to a bounded probability of failure, and have been frequently applied for planning with potentially dangerous outcomes or unknown environments. Solution algorithms have required strong heuristics or have been limited to relatively small problems with up to millions of states, because the optimal action to take from a given state depends on the probability of failure in the rest of the policy, leading to a coupled problem that is difficult to solve. In this paper we examine a generalization of a CCMDP that trades off probability of failure against reward through a functional relationship. We derive a constraint that can be applied to each state history in a policy individually, and which guarantees that the chance constraint will be satisfied. The approach decouples states in the CCMDP, so that large problems can be solved efficiently. We then introduce Vulcan, which uses our constraint in order to apply Monte Carlo Tree Search to CCMDPs. Vulcan can be applied to problems where it is unfeasible to generate the entire state space, and policies must be returned in an anytime manner. We show that Vulcan and its variants run tens to hundreds of times faster than linear programming methods, and over ten times faster than heuristic based methods, all without the need for a heuristic, and returning solutions with a mean suboptimality on the order of a few percent. Finally, we use Vulcan to solve for a chance constrained policy in a CCMDP with over $10^{13}$ states in 3 minutes.