Related papers: On Polynomial Sized MDP Succinct Policies
The importance of hierarchically structured representations for tractable planning has long been acknowledged. However, the questions of how people discover such abstractions and how to define a set of optimal abstractions remain open. This…
Partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) model specific environments in sequential decision-making under uncertainty. Critically, optimal policies for POMDPs may not be robust against perturbations in the environment.…
Real-world sequential decision making problems commonly involve partial observability, which requires the agent to maintain a memory of history in order to infer the latent states, plan and make good decisions. Coping with partial…
This paper studies parametric Markov decision processes (pMDPs), an extension to Markov decision processes (MDPs) where transitions probabilities are described by polynomials over a finite set of parameters. Fixing values for all parameters…
In this paper we investigate several geometric properties of the set of occupancy measures. In particular, we analyse the structure of the faces generated by a given occupancy measure, together with their relative algebraic interior. We…
This paper studies Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with atomless initial state distributions and atomless transition probabilities. Such MDPs are called atomless. The initial state distribution is considered to be fixed. We show that for…
Motivated by wide-ranging applications such as video delivery over networks using Multiple Description Codes, congestion control, and inventory management, we study the state-tracking of a Markovian random process with a known transition…
We consider Incentive Decision Processes, where a principal seeks to reduce its costs due to another agent's behavior, by offering incentives to the agent for alternate behavior. We focus on the case where a principal interacts with a…
The monolithic approach to policy representation in Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) looks for a single policy that can be represented as a function from states to actions. For the monolithic approach to succeed (and this is not always…
In this paper, we consider the finite-state approximation of a discrete-time constrained Markov decision process (MDP) under the discounted and average cost criteria. Using the linear programming formulation of the constrained discounted…
We consider the Markov Decision Process (MDP) of selecting a subset of items at each step, termed the Select-MDP (S-MDP). The large state and action spaces of S-MDPs make them intractable to solve with typical reinforcement learning (RL)…
We cast episodic Markov decision process (MDP) planning as Bayesian inference over policies. A policy is treated as the latent variable and is assigned an unnormalized probability of optimality that is monotone in its expected return,…
Markov Decision Problems (MDPs) provide a foundational framework for modelling sequential decision-making across diverse domains, guided by optimality criteria such as discounted and average rewards. However, these criteria have inherent…
We study the complexity of algorithmic problems for matrices that are represented by multi-terminal decision diagrams (MTDD). These are a variant of ordered decision diagrams, where the terminal nodes are labeled with arbitrary elements of…
We propose an algorithm for deterministic continuous Markov Decision Processes with sparse rewards that computes the optimal policy exactly with no dependency on the size of the state space. The algorithm has time complexity of $O( |R|^3…
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…
We consider Markov decision processes (MDPs) in which the transition probabilities and rewards belong to an uncertainty set parametrized by a collection of random variables. The probability distributions for these random parameters are…
This paper proposes a novel termination criterion, termed the advantage gap function, for finite state and action Markov decision processes (MDP) and reinforcement learning (RL). By incorporating this advantage gap function into the design…
In this paper we study online Reinforcement Learning (RL) in partially observable dynamical systems. We focus on the Predictive State Representations (PSRs) model, which is an expressive model that captures other well-known models such as…
We present new algorithms for computing and approximating bisimulation metrics in Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). Bisimulation metrics are an elegant formalism that capture behavioral equivalence between states and provide strong…