Related papers: Efficient Solution Algorithms for Factored MDPs
Markov decision processes (MDPs) are used to model a wide variety of applications ranging from game playing over robotics to finance. Their optimal policy typically maximizes the expected sum of rewards given at each step of the decision…
We study the synthesis of a policy in a Markov decision process (MDP) following which an agent reaches a target state in the MDP while minimizing its total discounted cost. The problem combines a reachability criterion with a discounted…
General-purpose, intelligent, learning agents cycle through sequences of observations, actions, and rewards that are complex, uncertain, unknown, and non-Markovian. On the other hand, reinforcement learning is well-developed for small…
Integrated task and motion planning has emerged as a challenging problem in sequential decision making, where a robot needs to compute high-level strategy and low-level motion plans for solving complex tasks. While high-level strategies…
It is well-known that by adding integrality constraints to the semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxation of the max-cut problem, the resulting integer semidefinite program is an exact formulation of the problem. In this paper we show…
Stochastic and soft optimal policies resulting from entropy-regularized Markov decision processes (ER-MDP) are desirable for exploration and imitation learning applications. Motivated by the fact that such policies are sensitive with…
This paper considers the problem of finding near-optimal Markovian randomized (MR) policies for finite-state-action, infinite-horizon, constrained risk-sensitive Markov decision processes (CRSMDPs). Constraints are in the form of standard…
Designing control policies for large, distributed systems is challenging, especially in the context of critical, temporal logic based specifications (e.g., safety) that must be met with high probability. Compositional methods for such…
We propose a method of approximating multivariate Gaussian probabilities using dynamic programming. We show that solving the optimization problem associated with a class of discrete-time finite horizon Markov decision processes with…
Constrained decision-making is essential for designing safe policies in real-world control systems, yet simulated environments often fail to capture real-world adversities. We consider the problem of learning a policy that will maximize the…
We present a finite-horizon optimization algorithm that extends the established concept of Dual Dynamic Programming (DDP) in two ways. First, in contrast to the linear costs, dynamics, and constraints of standard DDP, we consider problems…
Planning and learning in Partially Observable MDPs (POMDPs) are among the most challenging tasks in both the AI and Operation Research communities. Although solutions to these problems are intractable in general, there might be special…
Policy gradient methods can solve complex tasks but often fail when the dimensionality of the action-space or objective multiplicity grow very large. This occurs, in part, because the variance on score-based gradient estimators scales…
Many applications -- including power systems, robotics, and economics -- involve a dynamical system interacting with a stochastic and hard-to-model environment. We adopt a reinforcement learning approach to control such systems.…
The online Markov decision process (MDP) is a generalization of the classical Markov decision process that incorporates changing reward functions. In this paper, we propose practical online MDP algorithms with policy iteration and…
Efficient virtual machine (VM) management can dramatically reduce energy consumption in data centers. Existing VM management algorithms fall into two categories based on whether the VMs' resource demands are assumed to be static or dynamic.…
The fixed-horizon constrained Markov Decision Process (C-MDP) is a well-known model for planning in stochastic environments under operating constraints. Chance-Constrained MDP (CC-MDP) is a variant that allows bounding the probability of…
Tensor network (TN) techniques - often used in the context of quantum many-body physics - have shown promise as a tool for tackling machine learning (ML) problems. The application of TNs to ML, however, has mostly focused on supervised and…
Multi-objective optimization models that encode ordered sequential constraints provide a solution to model various challenging problems including encoding preferences, modeling a curriculum, and enforcing measures of safety. A recently…
Deep matrix factorizations (deep MFs) are recent unsupervised data mining techniques inspired by constrained low-rank approximations. They aim to extract complex hierarchies of features within high-dimensional datasets. Most of the loss…