Related papers: Practical Linear Value-approximation Techniques fo…
Solving partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) typically requires reasoning about the values of exponentially many state beliefs. Towards practical performance, state-of-the-art solvers use value bounds to guide this…
This work investigates a new approach to find closed form analytical approximate solution of linear initial value problems. Classical Bernoulli polynomials have been used to derive a finite set of orthonormal polynomials and a finite…
We develop and analyse a first-order algorithm for the A-optimal experimental design problem. The problem is first presented as a special case of a parametric family of optimal design problems for which duality results and optimality…
We study an approach to policy selection for large relational Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). We consider a variant of approximate policy iteration (API) that replaces the usual value-function learning step with a learning step in policy…
Linear programming is the seminal optimization problem that has spawned and grown into today's rich and diverse optimization modeling and algorithmic landscape. This article provides an overview of the recent development of first-order…
The continuous nature of belief states in POMDPs presents significant computational challenges in learning the optimal policy. In this paper, we consider an approach that solves a Partially Observable Reinforcement Learning (PORL) problem…
Real-world problems of operations research are typically high-dimensional and combinatorial. Linear programs are generally used to formulate and efficiently solve these large decision problems. However, in multi-period decision problems, we…
Many modern solvers and program analyzers rely on non-monotone reasoning (e.g. negation-as-failure, speculative updates, backtracking) for which classical monotone fixed-point methods do not apply. The general problem of finding the fixed…
This paper shows that the optimal policy and value functions of a Markov Decision Process (MDP), either discounted or not, can be captured by a finite-horizon undiscounted Optimal Control Problem (OCP), even if based on an inexact model.…
Factored Markov decision processes (MDPs) are a prominent paradigm within the artificial intelligence community for modeling and solving large-scale MDPs whose rewards and dynamics decompose into smaller, loosely interacting components.…
We consider finite model approximations of discrete-time partially observed Markov decision processes (POMDPs) under the discounted cost criterion. After converting the original partially observed stochastic control problem to a fully…
Many large MDPs can be represented compactly using a dynamic Bayesian network. Although the structure of the value function does not retain the structure of the process, recent work has shown that value functions in factored MDPs can often…
We consider the problem of approximating a given matrix by a low-rank matrix so as to minimize the entrywise $\ell_p$-approximation error, for any $p \geq 1$; the case $p = 2$ is the classical SVD problem. We obtain the first provably good…
It is a challenging problem that solving the \textit{multivariate linear model} (MLM) $\mathbf{A}\mathbf{x}=\mathbf{b}$ with the $\ell_1 $-norm approximation method such that $||\mathbf{A}\mathbf{x}-\mathbf{b}||_1$, the $\ell_1$-norm of the…
We present a heuristic search algorithm for solving first-order MDPs (FOMDPs). Our approach combines first-order state abstraction that avoids evaluating states individually, and heuristic search that avoids evaluating all states. Firstly,…
This paper addresses a fundamental issue central to approximation methods for solving large Markov decision processes (MDPs): how to automatically learn the underlying representation for value function approximation? A novel theoretically…
We propose a principled kernel-based policy iteration algorithm to solve the continuous-state Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). In contrast to most decision-theoretic planning frameworks, which assume fully known state transition models, we…
In this paper we present a review of the connections between classical algorithms for solving Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) and classical gradient-based algorithms in convex optimization. Some of these connections date as far back as the…
The paper investigates stochastic resource allocation problems with scarce, reusable resources and non-preemtive, time-dependent, interconnected tasks. This approach is a natural generalization of several standard resource management…
Markov decision processes (MDPs) with rewards are a widespread and well-studied model for systems that make both probabilistic and nondeterministic choices. A fundamental result about MDPs is that their minimal and maximal expected rewards…