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Recent research in decision theoretic planning has focussed on making the solution of Markov decision processes (MDPs) more feasible. We develop a family of algorithms for structured reachability analysis of MDPs that are suitable when an…
We consider a broad class of dynamic programming (DP) problems that involve a partially linear structure and some positivity properties in their system equation and cost function. We address deterministic and stochastic problems, possibly…
Markov decision processes (MDPs) provide a standard framework for sequential decision making under uncertainty. However, MDPs do not take uncertainty in transition probabilities into account. Robust Markov decision processes (RMDPs) address…
We study a class of multi-stage stochastic programs, which incorporate modeling features from Markov decision processes (MDPs). This class includes structured MDPs with continuous action and state spaces. We extend policy graphs to include…
We consider the problem of controlling a fully specified Markov decision process (MDP), also known as the planning problem, when the state space is very large and calculating the optimal policy is intractable. Instead, we pursue the more…
Within the framework of probably approximately correct Markov decision processes (PAC-MDP), much theoretical work has focused on methods to attain near optimality after a relatively long period of learning and exploration. However,…
We study upper and lower bounds on the sample-complexity of learning near-optimal behaviour in finite-state discounted Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). For the upper bound we make the assumption that each action leads to at most two…
A labelled Markov decision process is a labelled Markov chain with nondeterminism, i.e., together with a strategy a labelled MDP induces a labelled Markov chain. The model is related to interval Markov chains. Motivated by applications of…
We study model-based learning of finite-window policies in tabular partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs). A common approach to learning under partial observability is to approximate unbounded history dependencies using…
We study countably infinite Markov decision processes (MDPs) with real-valued transition rewards. Every infinite run induces the following sequences of payoffs: 1. Point payoff (the sequence of directly seen transition rewards), 2. Mean…
In this work, we consider a cooperative multi-agent Markov decision process (MDP) involving m agents. At each decision epoch, all the m agents independently select actions in order to maximize a common long-term objective. In the policy…
In this work, we study dynamic programming (DP) algorithms for partially observable Markov decision processes with jointly continuous and discrete state-spaces. We consider a class of stochastic systems which have coupled discrete and…
In this paper we consider the problem of computing the stationary distribution of nearly completely decomposable Markov processes, a well-established area in the classical theory of Markov processes with broad applications in the design,…
We study countably infinite Markov decision processes (MDPs) with real-valued transition rewards. Every infinite run induces the following sequences of payoffs: 1. Point payoff (the sequence of directly seen transition rewards), 2. Total…
This paper proposes a quantum algorithm for Markov chain spectral gap estimation that is quasi-optimal (i.e., optimal up to a polylogarithmic factor) in the number of vertices for all parameters, and additionally quasi-optimal in the…
In this paper we derive an efficient method for computing the indices associated with an asymptotically optimal upper confidence bound algorithm (MDP-UCB) of Burnetas and Katehakis (1997) that only requires solving a system of two…
In many operations management problems, we need to make decisions sequentially to minimize the cost while satisfying certain constraints. One modeling approach to study such problems is constrained Markov decision process (CMDP). When…
We give polynomial-time algorithms for computing the values of Markov decision processes (MDPs) with limsup and liminf objectives. A real-valued reward is assigned to each state, and the value of an infinite path in the MDP is the limsup…
Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) have been used to formulate many decision-making problems in science and engineering. The objective is to synthesize the best decision (action selection) policies to maximize expected rewards (or minimize…
We present a new tool for verification of modal mu-calculus formulae for process specifications, based on symbolic parity games. It enhances an existing method, that first encodes the problem to a Parameterised Boolean Equation System…