Belief-Dependent Macro-Action Discovery in POMDPs using the Value of Information

This work introduces macro-action discovery using value-of-information (VoI) for robust and efficient planning in partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs). POMDPs are a powerful framework for planning under uncertainty. Previous approaches have used high-level macro-actions within POMDP policies to reduce planning complexity. However, macro-action design is often heuristic and rarely comes with performance guarantees. Here, we present a method for extracting belief-dependent, variable-length macro-actions directly from a low-level POMDP model. We construct macro-actions by chaining sequences of open-loop actions together when the task-specific value of information (VoI) --- the change in expected task performance caused by observations in the current planning iteration --- is low.