Related papers: Bounding Procedures for Stochastic Dynamic Program…
We consider the revenue management problem of finding profit-maximising prices for delivery time slots in the context of attended home delivery. This multi-stage optimal control problem admits a dynamic programming formulation that is…
Constrained partially observable Markov decision processes (CPOMDPs) have been used to model various real-world phenomena. However, they are notoriously difficult to solve to optimality, and there exist only a few approximation methods for…
We consider (stochastic) softmax policy gradient (PG) methods for bandits and tabular Markov decision processes (MDPs). While the PG objective is non-concave, recent research has used the objective's smoothness and gradient domination…
This work considers a Motion Planning Problem with Dynamic Obstacles (MPDO) in 2D that requires finding a minimum-arrival-time collision-free trajectory for a point robot between its start and goal locations amid dynamic obstacles moving…
Differential Dynamic Programming (DDP) is an efficient trajectory optimization algorithm relying on second-order approximations of a system's dynamics and cost function, and has recently been applied to optimize systems with time-invariant…
We study episodic reinforcement learning (RL) in non-stationary linear kernel Markov decision processes (MDPs). In this setting, both the reward function and the transition kernel are linear with respect to the given feature maps and are…
A robust-to-dynamics optimization (RDO) problem is an optimization problem specified by two pieces of input: (i) a mathematical program (an objective function $f:\mathbb{R}^n\rightarrow\mathbb{R}$ and a feasible set…
Autonomous agents are limited in their ability to observe the world state. Partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) formally model the problem of planning under world state uncertainty, but POMDPs with continuous actions and…
This paper investigates the limit behavior of Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) made of independent particles evolving in a common environment, when the number of particles goes to infinity. In the finite horizon case or with a discounted…
Safety in stochastic control systems, which are subject to random noise with a known probability distribution, aims to compute policies that satisfy predefined operational constraints with high confidence throughout the uncertain evolution…
In this paper, a convex optimization-based method is proposed for numerically solving dynamic programs in continuous state and action spaces. The key idea is to approximate the output of the Bellman operator at a particular state by the…
Partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) provide a modeling framework for autonomous decision making under uncertainty and imperfect sensing, e.g. robot manipulation and self-driving cars. However, optimal control of POMDPs…
We present a dynamic programming-based solution to a stochastic optimal control problem up to a hitting time for a discrete-time Markov control process. Firstly, we determine an optimal control policy to steer the process toward a compact…
We investigate the problems of model estimation and reward-free learning in episodic Block MDPs. In these MDPs, the decision maker has access to rich observations or contexts generated from a small number of latent states. We are first…
Many control problems in environments that can be modeled as Markov decision processes (MDPs) concern infinite-time horizon specifications. The classical aim in this context is to compute a control policy that maximizes the probability of…
Following the occurrence of an extreme natural or man-made event, community recovery management should aim at providing optimal restoration policies for a community over a planning horizon. Calculating such optimal restoration polices in…
Motivated by many application problems, we consider Markov decision processes (MDPs) with a general loss function and unknown parameters. To mitigate the epistemic uncertainty associated with unknown parameters, we take a Bayesian approach…
The most common approaches for solving stochastic resource allocation problems in the research literature is to either use value functions ("dynamic programming") or scenario trees ("stochastic programming") to approximate the impact of a…
We show that one can approximate the least fixed point solution for a multivariate system of monotone probabilistic max(min) polynomial equations, referred to as maxPPSs (and minPPSs, respectively), in time polynomial in both the encoding…
We consider the problem of optimally controlling stochastic, Markovian systems subject to joint chance constraints over a finite-time horizon. For such problems, standard Dynamic Programming is inapplicable due to the time correlation of…