Robots operating in real-world environments must reason about possible
outcomes of stochastic actions and make decisions based on partial observations
of the true world state. A major challenge for making accurate and robust
action predictions is the problem of confounding, which if left untreated can
lead to prediction errors. The partially observable Markov decision process
(POMDP) is a widely-used framework to model these stochastic and
partially-observable decision-making problems. However, due to a lack of
explicit causal semantics, POMDP planning methods are prone to confounding bias
and thus in the presence of unobserved confounders may produce underperforming
policies. This paper presents a novel causally-informed extension of "anytime
regularized determinized sparse partially observable tree" (AR-DESPOT), a
modern anytime online POMDP planner, using causal modelling and inference to
eliminate errors caused by unmeasured confounder variables. We further propose
a method to learn offline the partial parameterisation of the causal model for
planning, from ground truth model data. We evaluate our methods on a toy
problem with an unobserved confounder and show that the learned causal model is
highly accurate, while our planning method is more robust to confounding and
produces overall higher performing policies than AR-DESPOT.

本文提出了使用因果建模和推理的新型持续时间在线部分可观测树规划器的因果知情扩展，以消除未测量混淆变量所引起的误差。同时，我们提出了一种离线学习因果模型的方法，用于规划。我们在一个具有未观察到混淆因素的玩具问题上评估了我们的方法，并表明所学习的因果模型非常准确，而我们的规划方法比 AR-DESPOT 更加抗干扰，并产生更高性能的策略。