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Policy iteration is a family of algorithms that are used to find an optimal policy for a given Markov Decision Problem (MDP). Simple Policy iteration (SPI) is a type of policy iteration where the strategy is to change the policy at exactly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-02 Sarthak Consul , Bhishma Dedhia , Kumar Ashutosh , Parthasarathi Khirwadkar

The infinite horizon setting is widely adopted for problems of reinforcement learning (RL). These invariably result in stationary policies that are optimal. In many situations, finite horizon control problems are of interest and for such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-21 Soumyajit Guin , Shalabh Bhatnagar

Recent non-asymptotic analyses have substantially advanced the theory of distributional policy evaluation, but they largely concern synchronous full-state updates under a generative model, model-based estimators, accelerated variants, or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Ege C. Kaya , Abolfazl Hashemi

We introduce a class of models for multidimensional control problems which we call skip-free Markov decision processes on trees. We describe and analyse an algorithm applicable to Markov decision processes of this type that are skip-free in…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2013-11-11 E. J. Collins

In this paper, we consider undiscouted infinite-horizon optimal control for deterministic systems with an uncountable state and input space. We specifically address the case when the classic value iteration does not converge. For such…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-04-15 Jonas Mair , Lukas Schwenkel , Matthias A. Müller , Frank Allgöwer

Markov decision processes (MDPs) are used to model stochastic systems in many applications. Several efficient algorithms to compute optimal policies have been studied in the literature, including value iteration (VI) and policy iteration.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-08-30 Vineet Goyal , Julien Grand-Clement

In this paper, we consider an infinite horizon average reward Markov Decision Process (MDP). Distinguishing itself from existing works within this context, our approach harnesses the power of the general policy gradient-based algorithm,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-06 Qinbo Bai , Washim Uddin Mondal , Vaneet Aggarwal

In stochastic dynamic environments, team Markov games have emerged as a versatile paradigm for studying sequential decision-making problems of fully cooperative multi-agent systems. However, the optimality of the derived policies is usually…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-05-03 Feng Huang , Ming Cao , Long Wang

This article extends the idea of solving parity games by strategy iteration to non-deterministic strategies: In a non-deterministic strategy a player restricts himself to some non-empty subset of possible actions at a given node, instead of…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2012-03-20 Michael Luttenberger

We develop a new framework for deriving time-uniform concentration bounds for the output of stochastic sequential algorithms satisfying certain recursive inequalities akin to those defining the almost-supermartingale processes introduced by…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-11-25 Tuan Pham , Alessandro Rinaldo , Purnamrita Sarkar

We propose a policy iteration method to solve an inverse problem for a mean-field game (MFG) model, specifically to reconstruct the obstacle function in the game from the partial observation data of value functions, which represent the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-12 Kui Ren , Nathan Soedjak , Shanyin Tong

We present the first model-free Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithm to synthesise policies for an unknown Markov Decision Process (MDP), such that a linear time property is satisfied. The given temporal property is converted into a Limit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-19 Mohammadhosein Hasanbeig , Alessandro Abate , Daniel Kroening

Inverse optimization (IO) seeks to infer the parameters of a decision-maker's objective from observed context--action data. We study noiseless IO, where demonstrations are generated by a ground-truth objective. We provide a high-probability…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-12 Pouria Fatemi , Hoomaan Maskan , Suvrit Sra , Peyman Mohajerin Esfahani

We study the problem of computing an optimal policy of an infinite-horizon discounted constrained Markov decision process (constrained MDP). Despite the popularity of Lagrangian-based policy search methods used in practice, the oscillation…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-01-18 Dongsheng Ding , Chen-Yu Wei , Kaiqing Zhang , Alejandro Ribeiro

In modern engineering scenarios, there is often a strict upper bound on the number of algorithm iterations that can be performed within a given time limit. This raises the question of optimal algorithmic configuration for a fixed and finite…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-12-31 Yushun Zhang , Dmitry Rybin , Zhi-Quan Luo

We present an efficient algorithm to compute the induced norms of finite-horizon Linear Time-Varying (LTV) systems. The formulation includes both induced $\mathcal{L}_2$ and terminal Euclidean norm penalties. Existing computational…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-11-03 Jyot Buch , Murat Arcak , Peter Seiler

We consider bandit problems involving a large (possibly infinite) collection of arms, in which the expected reward of each arm is a linear function of an $r$-dimensional random vector $\mathbf{Z} \in \mathbb{R}^r$, where $r \geq 2$. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2010-02-24 Paat Rusmevichientong , John N. Tsitsiklis

Westudy how a planner can design dynamic interventions to overcome status-quo inertia in living temporal games, where strategic agents control their state (active, sleep, partially dead) on a temporal network. Building on the…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-05-20 Madjid Eshaghi Gordji , Ali Jabbari , Mohammad Ali Berahman , Esmaiel Abounoori

We consider infinite-horizon stationary $\gamma$-discounted Markov Decision Processes, for which it is known that there exists a stationary optimal policy. Using Value and Policy Iteration with some error $\epsilon$ at each iteration, it is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-11-30 Bruno Scherrer , Boris Lesner

In this paper, we study asymptotic properties of problems of control of stochastic discrete time systems (also known as Markov decision processes) with time averaging and time discounting optimality criteria, and we establish that the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-03-09 Konstantin Avrachenkov , Vladimir Gaitsgory , Lucas Gamertsfelder