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Optimal decision-making under partial observability requires agents to balance reducing uncertainty (exploration) against pursuing immediate objectives (exploitation). In this paper, we introduce a novel policy optimization framework for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Hany Abdulsamad , Sahel Iqbal , Simo Särkkä

The policy gradient theorem (Sutton et al., 2000) prescribes the usage of a cumulative discounted state distribution under the target policy to approximate the gradient. Most algorithms based on this theorem, in practice, break this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-08 Samuele Tosatto , Andrew Patterson , Martha White , A. Rupam Mahmood

We consider a finite-state partially observable Markov decision problem (POMDP) with an infinite horizon and a discounted cost, and we propose a new method for computing a cost function approximation that is based on features and…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-07-08 Yuchao Li , Kim Hammar , Dimitri Bertsekas

We propose an actor-critic framework to solve the time-continuous stochastic optimal control problem. A least square temporal difference method is applied to compute the value function for the critic. The policy gradient method is…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-01-27 Mo Zhou , Jianfeng Lu

We propose networked policy gradient play for solving Markov potential games with continuous and/or discrete state-action pairs. During the game, agents use parametrized and differentiable policies that depend on the current state and the…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-10-02 Sarper Aydin , Ceyhun Eksin

We present quantum observable Markov decision processes (QOMDPs), the quantum analogues of partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs). In a QOMDP, an agent's state is represented as a quantum state and the agent can choose a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2015-06-19 Jennifer Barry , Daniel T. Barry , Scott Aaronson

Actor-critic (AC) methods have exhibited great empirical success compared with other reinforcement learning algorithms, where the actor uses the policy gradient to improve the learning policy and the critic uses temporal difference learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-11 Yue Wu , Weitong Zhang , Pan Xu , Quanquan Gu

We prove the stability and global convergence of a coupled actor-critic gradient flow for infinite-horizon and entropy-regularised Markov decision processes (MDPs) in continuous state and action space with linear function approximation…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-17 Denis Zorba , David Šiška , Lukasz Szpruch

In the theory of Partially Observed Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs), existence of optimal policies have in general been established via converting the original partially observed stochastic control problem to a fully observed one on the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-01-11 Ali Devran Kara , Serdar Yuksel

We study observation-based strategies for partially-observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) with omega-regular objectives. An observation-based strategy relies on partial information about the history of a play, namely, on the past…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2015-05-14 Krishnendu Chatterjee , Laurent Doyen , Thomas A. Henzinger

We present an alternative view for the study of optimal control of partially observed Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs). We first revisit the traditional (and by now standard) separated-design method of reducing the problem to fully…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-12-20 Serdar Yüksel

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-01 Lakshmi Mandal , Chandrashekar Lakshminarayanan , Shalabh Bhatnagar

The standard approach for Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) is to convert them to a fully observed belief-state MDP. However, the belief state depends on the system model and is therefore not viable in reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-30 Amit Sinha , Matthieu Geist , Aditya Mahajan

Active classification, i.e., the sequential decision-making process aimed at data acquisition for classification purposes, arises naturally in many applications, including medical diagnosis, intrusion detection, and object tracking. In this…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2018-10-02 Bo Wu , Mohamadreza Ahmadi , Suda Bharadwaj , Ufuk Topcu

We revisit the finite time analysis of policy gradient methods in the one of the simplest settings: finite state and action MDPs with a policy class consisting of all stochastic policies and with exact gradient evaluations. There has been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-14 Jalaj Bhandari , Daniel Russo

Markov decision processes (MDPs) is viewed as an optimization of an objective function over certain linear operators over general function spaces. A new existence result is established for the existence of optimal policies in general MDPs,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-01 Abhishek Gupta , Aditya Mahajan

To learn approximately optimal acting policies for decision problems, modern Actor Critic algorithms rely on deep Neural Networks (DNNs) to parameterize the acting policy and greedification operators to iteratively improve it. The reliance…

We consider policy evaluation in infinite-horizon discounted Markov decision problems (MDPs) with infinite spaces. We reformulate this task a compositional stochastic program with a function-valued decision variable that belongs to a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-05-19 Alec Koppel , Garrett Warnell , Ethan Stump , Peter Stone , Alejandro Ribeiro

We reformulate the option framework as two parallel augmented MDPs. Under this novel formulation, all policy optimization algorithms can be used off the shelf to learn intra-option policies, option termination conditions, and a master…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-12 Shangtong Zhang , Shimon Whiteson

We introduce a reinforcement learning method for a class of non-Markov systems; our approach extends the actor-critic framework given by Rose et al. [New J. Phys. 23 013013 (2021)] for obtaining scaled cumulant generating functions…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2026-03-09 Venkata D. Pamulaparthy , Rosemary J. Harris