Planning with Submodular Objective Functions

Abstract: We study planning with submodular objective functions, where instead of maximizing the cumulative reward, the goal is to maximize the objective value induced by a submodular function. Our framework subsumes standard planning and submodular maximization with cardinality constraints as special cases, and thus many practical applications can be naturally formulated within our framework. Based on the notion of multilinear extension, we propose a novel and theoretically principled algorithmic framework for planning with submodular objective functions, which recovers classical algorithms when applied to the two special cases mentioned above. Empirically, our approach significantly outperforms baseline algorithms on synthetic environments and navigation tasks.