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I will attempt to provide an answer to your questions based on the information you can find in the papers A Heuristic Variable Grid Solution Method for POMDPs (1997) by Ronen I. Brafman and Point-based value iteration: An anytime algorithm for POMDPs (2003) by Joelle Pineau et al. A grid-based approximate solution to a POMDP attempts to estimate a value ...

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There is indeed a close parallel here, but the concepts are distinct. Every perfect information game is fully observable, but not every fully observable game is a game of perfect information. A game of imperfect information is one in which you lack knowledge of any of the following: The state of the game (e.g. current market prices). The rewards you will ...

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The usual (as presented in Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction) $Q$-learning and SARSA algorithms use (and update) a function of a state $s$ and action $a$, $Q(s, a)$. These algorithms assume that the current state $s$ is known. However, in POMDP, at each time step, the agent does not know the current state, but it maintains a "belief" (which, ...

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I think that the normalisation factor is assumed to be non-zero. So, in practice, I guess, you must eventually check that $P(z \mid b, a)$ is non-zero (even though, I guess, it will likely never be zero because of round-off errors in computers). The formula to calculate $b'(s')$ comes from its definition, which is based on Bayes' theorem, where the ...

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$O(a, s', z) = \mathbb{P}(z \mid a, s')$ is a conditional probability distribution, so it always needs to sum up to $1$. You should interpret $O(a, s', z)$ as the probability of observation $z$, given that the agent took action $a$ and landed in state $s'$. $O(a, s', z)$ is thus not a joint distribution, even though the notation $O(a, s', z)$ might suggest ...

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Both Belief-MDPs and Bayes-Adaptive MDPs (BAMDPs) are special cases of POMDPs and their state space is augmented with a belief over their unobserved/hidden variables. In a belief-MDP, the hidden variables can change over the course of an episode. (Eg. Both the position and the uncertainty in the position of the robot can vary during an episode). In a BAMDP, ...

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Is it possible for value-based methods to learn stochastic policies? Yes, but only in a limited sense, due to the ways it is possible to generate stochastic policies from a value function. For instance, the simplest exploratory policy used by SARSA and Monte Carlo Control, $\epsilon$-greedy, is stochastic. SARSA natually learns the optimal $\epsilon$-...

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Not exactly, at least traditionally: in Game Theory, "imperfect information" is most often defined as agents having only partial information about the history of agents' actions, as you correctly noted. But also note that this doesn't refer to the general world facts or state. But "partial observability" is typically used in terms of systems, e.g. in Markov ...

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Yes, the core differences between the different categories of problems are correct as you've described them. For SMDPs, I'd like to remark that the water boiling example is maybe not the best. That looks more like an example of "delayed rewards", but not one of "durative actions": when the agent takes that action to raise the temperature, ...

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There is no major difference here between a POMDP and MDP. When setting reward values, you are generally trying to give the minimal information to the agent that when the sum of rewards is maximised, it solves the problem that you are posing. In literature it is common to use one simple number as a reward, but I am not sure if this is really how you ...

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