Avoiding Undesired Future with Sequential Decisions.

Machine learning has advanced in predictive tasks, but practitioners often need to proactively avoid undesired outcomes rather than just predicting them. To this end, a framework called rehearsal has been introduced, which tackles the avoiding undesired future (AUF) problem by modeling how variables influence each other and searching for a decision that leads to desired results. In this paper, we propose a novel rehearsal approach for addressing the AUF problem by making a sequence of decisions, where each decision is dynamically informed by the latest observations via retrospective inference. Theoretically, we show that sequential decisions in our approach tend to achieve a higher success rate in avoiding undesired outcomes by more reliably inferring the outcome of actions compared with existing solutions. Perhaps surprisingly, our approach remains advantageous even under imprecise modeling of relations between variables, and we provide a sufficient condition under which the advantage holds. Finally, experimental results confirm the practical effectiveness of the proposed approach in both simulated and real-world tasks.