Rule-based Shielding for Partially Observable Monte-Carlo Planning
  Partially Observable Monte-Carlo Planning (POMCP) is a powerful online
algorithm able to generate approximate policies for large Partially Observable
Markov Decision Processes. The online nature of this method supports
scalability by avoiding complete policy representation. The lack of an explicit
representation however hinders policy interpretability and makes policy
verification very complex. In this work, we propose two contributions. The
first is a method for identifying unexpected actions selected by POMCP with
respect to expert prior knowledge of the task. The second is a shielding
approach that prevents POMCP from selecting unexpected actions. The first
method is based on Satisfiability Modulo Theory (SMT). It inspects traces
(i.e., sequences of belief-action-observation triplets) generated by POMCP to
compute the parameters of logical formulas about policy properties defined by
the expert. The second contribution is a module that uses online the logical
formulas to identify anomalous actions selected by POMCP and substitutes those
actions with actions that satisfy the logical formulas fulfilling expert
knowledge. We evaluate our approach on Tiger, a standard benchmark for POMDPs,
and a real-world problem related to velocity regulation in mobile robot
navigation. Results show that the shielded POMCP outperforms the standard POMCP
in a case study in which a wrong parameter of POMCP makes it select wrong
actions from time to time. Moreover, we show that the approach keeps good
performance also if the parameters of the logical formula are optimized using
trajectories containing some wrong actions.
