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In this paper we extend temporal difference policy evaluation algorithms to performance criteria that include the variance of the cumulative reward. Such criteria are useful for risk management, and are important in domains such as finance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-10-15 Aviv Tamar , Dotan Di Castro , Shie Mannor

This paper presents the first actor-critic algorithm for off-policy reinforcement learning. Our algorithm is online and incremental, and its per-time-step complexity scales linearly with the number of learned weights. Previous work on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-03-20 Thomas Degris , Martha White , Richard S. Sutton

The synthesis problem for partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) is to compute a policy that satisfies a given specification. Such policies have to take the full execution history of a POMDP into account, rendering the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-07-20 Leonore Winterer , Ralf Wimmer , Nils Jansen , Bernd Becker

We study off-policy evaluation and learning from sequential data in a structured class of Markov decision processes that arise from repeated interactions with an exogenous sequence of arrivals with contexts, which generate unknown…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-20 Nathan Kallus , Angela Zhou

Many multi-agent systems (MASs) are situated in stochastic environments. Some such systems that are based on the partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) do not take the benevolence of other agents for granted. We propose a new…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-05-15 Gavin Rens , Abhaya Nayak , Thomas Meyer

We study the problem of synthesizing a controller that maximizes the entropy of a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) subject to a constraint on the expected total reward. Such a controller minimizes the predictability of a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-09-16 Michael Hibbard , Yagiz Savas , Bo Wu , Takashi Tanaka , Ufuk Topcu

This paper addresses the problem of training a reinforcement learning (RL) policy under partial observability by exploiting a privileged, anytime-feasible planner agent available exclusively during training. We formalize this as a Partially…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-10 Mohsen Amiri , Mohsen Amiri , Ali Beikmohammadi , Sindri Magnuśson , Mehdi Hosseinzadeh

In this work, we study the problem of finding robust and safe policies in Robust Constrained Average-Cost Markov Decision Processes (RCMDPs). A key challenge in this setting is the lack of strong duality, which prevents the direct use of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Anirudh Satheesh , Sooraj Sathish , Swetha Ganesh , Keenan Powell , Vaneet Aggarwal

Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) is a mathematical framework for modeling decision-making under uncertainty, where the agent's observations are incomplete and the underlying system dynamics are probabilistic. Solving the…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-12-20 Yide Yu , Yue Liu , Xiaochen Yuan , Dennis Wong , Huijie Li , Yan Ma

Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) provide an efficient way to model real-world sequential decision making processes. Motivated by the problem of maintenance and inspection of a group of infrastructure components with…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-08-15 Manav Vora , Pranay Thangeda , Michael N. Grussing , Melkior Ornik

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a fundamental framework for sequential decision-making, in which an agent learns an optimal policy through interactions with an unknown environment. In settings with function approximation, many existing RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Ruiquan Huang , Donghao Li , Yingbin Liang , Jing Yang

Under what circumstances can a system be said to have beliefs and goals, and how do such agency-related features relate to its physical state? Recent work has proposed a notion of interpretation map, a function that maps the state of a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-07-14 Martin Biehl , Nathaniel Virgo

Optimizing a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) policy is challenging. The policy graph improvement (PGI) algorithm for POMDPs represents the policy as a fixed size policy graph and improves the policy monotonically. Due…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-09-07 Joni Pajarinen

Many medical decision-making tasks can be framed as partially observed Markov decision processes (POMDPs). However, prevailing two-stage approaches that first learn a POMDP and then solve it often fail because the model that best fits the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-04-01 Joseph Futoma , Michael C. Hughes , Finale Doshi-Velez

A variety of theoretically-sound policy gradient algorithms exist for the on-policy setting due to the policy gradient theorem, which provides a simplified form for the gradient. The off-policy setting, however, has been less clear due to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-17 Eric Graves , Ehsan Imani , Raksha Kumaraswamy , Martha White

We prove under commonly used assumptions the convergence of actor-critic reinforcement learning algorithms, which simultaneously learn a policy function, the actor, and a value function, the critic. Both functions can be deep neural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-03 Markus Holzleitner , Lukas Gruber , José Arjona-Medina , Johannes Brandstetter , Sepp Hochreiter

We identify a fundamental problem in policy gradient-based methods in continuous control. As policy gradient methods require the agent's underlying probability distribution, they limit policy representation to parametric distribution…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-26 Chen Tessler , Guy Tennenholtz , Shie Mannor

We study the synthesis of policies for multi-agent systems to implement spatial-temporal tasks. We formalize the problem as a factored Markov decision process subject to so-called graph temporal logic specifications. The transition function…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2020-01-27 Murat Cubuktepe , Zhe Xu , Ufuk Topcu

We develop a model for credit rating migration that accounts for the impact of economic state fluctuations on default probabilities. The joint process for the economic state and the rating is modelled as a time-homogeneous Markov chain.…

Risk Management · Quantitative Finance 2024-03-25 Michael Kalkbrener , Natalie Packham

In this article we propose a qualitative (ordinal) counterpart for the Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes model (POMDP) in which the uncertainty, as well as the preferences of the agent, are modeled by possibility distributions.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2013-01-30 Regis Sabbadin