In: Proceedings of the Tenth Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence, 1994.

Abstracting Probabilistic Actions

Peter Haddawy AnHai Doan Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science University of Wisconsin­Milwaukee PO Box 784 Milwaukee, WI 53201 haddawy,anhai@cs.uwm.edu

Abstract

This paper discusses the problem of abstract­ ing conditional probabilistic actions. We identify two distinct types of abstraction: intra­action abstraction and inter­action ab­ straction. We define what it means for the abstraction of an action to be correct and then derive two methods of intra­action ab­ straction and two methods of inter­action ab­ straction which are correct according to this criterion. We illustrate the developed tech­ niques by applying them to actions described with the temporal action representation used in the drips decision­theoretic planner and we describe how the planner uses abstraction to reduce the complexity of planning.