Related papers: Optimal Limited Contingency Planning
To plan safely in uncertain environments, agents must balance utility with safety constraints. Safe planning problems can be modeled as a chance-constrained partially observable Markov decision process (CC-POMDP) and solutions often use…
The article introduces the stochastic N-k interdiction problem for power grid operations and planning that aims to identify a subset of k components (out of N components) that maximizes the expected damage, measured in terms of load shed.…
The problem of optimal motion planing and control is fundamental in robotics. However, this problem is intractable for continuous-time stochastic systems in general and the solution is difficult to approximate if non-instantaneous nonlinear…
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…
Large-scale controlled evacuations require emergency services to select evacuation routes, decide departure times, and mobilize resources to issue orders, all under strict time constraints. Existing algorithms almost always allow for…
In this paper, we study planning in stochastic systems, modeled as Markov decision processes (MDPs), with preferences over temporally extended goals. Prior work on temporal planning with preferences assumes that the user preferences form a…
Suppose an online platform wants to compare a treatment and control policy, e.g., two different matching algorithms in a ridesharing system, or two different inventory management algorithms in an online retail site. Standard randomized…
We consider qualitative strategy synthesis for the formalism called consumption Markov decision processes. This formalism can model dynamics of an agents that operates under resource constraints in a stochastic environment. The presented…
While policy-based reinforcement learning (RL) achieves tremendous successes in practice, it is significantly less understood in theory, especially compared with value-based RL. In particular, it remains elusive how to design a provably…
In this paper, we study the problem of optimal multi-robot path planning (MPP) on graphs. We propose two multiflow based integer linear programming (ILP) models that computes minimum last arrival time and minimum total distance solutions…
In this paper, we show how a simulated Markov decision process (MDP) built by the so-called \emph{baseline} policies, can be used to compute a different policy, namely the \emph{simulated optimal} policy, for which the performance of this…
Robotic manipulators are essential for future autonomous systems, yet limited trust in their autonomy has confined them to rigid, task-specific systems. The intricate configuration space of manipulators, coupled with the challenges of…
We introduce \texttt{OPO-CMDP}, the first policy optimization algorithm for stochastic Contextual Markov Decision Process (CMDPs) under general offline function approximation. Our approach achieves a high probability regret bound of…
We consider scheduling in a quantum switch with stochastic entanglement generation, finite quantum memories, and decoherence. The objective is to design a scheduling algorithm with polynomial-time computational complexity that stabilizes a…
With the simultaneous rise of energy costs and demand for cloud computing, efficient control of data centers becomes crucial. In the data center control problem, one needs to plan at every time step how many servers to switch on or off in…
Scheduling is a critical part of practical computer systems, and scheduling has also been extensively studied from a theoretical perspective. Unfortunately, there is a gap between theory and practice, as the optimal scheduling policies…
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…
In this paper, we provide a novel algorithm for solving planning and learning problems of Markov decision processes. The proposed algorithm follows a policy iteration-type update by using a rank-one approximation of the transition…
Constrained decision-making is essential for designing safe policies in real-world control systems, yet simulated environments often fail to capture real-world adversities. We consider the problem of learning a policy that will maximize the…
A challenging category of robotics problems arises when sensing incurs substantial costs. This paper examines settings in which a robot wishes to limit its observations of state, for instance, motivated by specific considerations of energy…