{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/information-gathering-in-decentralized-pomdps","title":"Information Gathering in Decentralized POMDPs by Policy Graph Improvement","arxiv_id":"1902.09840","date":"2019-02-26","proceeding":null,"authors":["Mikko Lauri","Joni Pajarinen","Jan Peters"],"abstract":"Decentralized policies for information gathering are required when multiple\nautonomous agents are deployed to collect data about a phenomenon of interest\nwithout the ability to communicate. Decentralized partially observable Markov\ndecision processes (Dec-POMDPs) are a general, principled model well-suited for\nsuch decentralized multiagent decision-making problems. In this paper, we\ninvestigate Dec-POMDPs for decentralized information gathering problems. An\noptimal solution of a Dec-POMDP maximizes the expected sum of rewards over\ntime. To encourage information gathering, we set the reward as a function of\nthe agents' state information, for example the negative Shannon entropy. We\nprove that if the reward is convex, then the finite-horizon value function of\nthe corresponding Dec-POMDP is also convex. We propose the first heuristic\nalgorithm for information gathering Dec-POMDPs, and empirically prove its\neffectiveness by solving problems an order of magnitude larger than previous\nstate-of-the-art.","url_abs":"http://arxiv.org/abs/1902.09840v1","url_pdf":"http://arxiv.org/pdf/1902.09840v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"information-gathering-in-decentralized-pomdps","repo_url":"https://github.com/laurimi/npgi","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"Apache-2.0"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"decision-making","task_name":"Decision Making"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":"https://syntology.ai/paper/1902.09840","atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=1902.09840","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}