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Universal Policies for Software-Defined MDPs (arxiv.org)
5 points by jessemhan on Dec 22, 2020 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: A new language turns a program into a decision problem and gives a universal policy: each 'choose' step returns everything needed to decide, and a learned oracle scores it to steer search. Trained on hundreds of synthetic tasks, it guided new tasks without retraining.

Abstract

We introduce a new programming paradigm called oracle-guided decision programming in which a program specifies a Markov Decision Process (MDP) and the language provides a universal policy. We prototype a new programming language, Dodona, that manifests this paradigm using a primitive 'choose' representing nondeterministic choice. The Dodona interpreter returns either a value or a choicepoint that includes a lossless encoding of all information necessary in principle to make an optimal decision. Meta-interpreters query Dodona's (neural) oracle on these choicepoints to get policy and value estimates, which they can use to perform heuristic search on the underlying MDP. We demonstrate Dodona's potential for zero-shot heuristic guidance by meta-learning over hundreds of synthetic tasks that simulate basic operations over lists, trees, Church datastructures, polynomials, first-order terms and higher-order terms.

Daniel Selsam, Jesse Michael Han, Leonardo de Moura, Patrice Godefroid
arXiv:2012.11401 · cs.AI, cs.PL · submitted Dec 21, 2020
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