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Policy gradient methods are among the most effective methods in challenging reinforcement learning problems with large state and/or action spaces. However, little is known about even their most basic theoretical convergence properties,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-16 Alekh Agarwal , Sham M. Kakade , Jason D. Lee , Gaurav Mahajan

Uncertain partially observable Markov decision processes (uPOMDPs) allow the probabilistic transition and observation functions of standard POMDPs to belong to a so-called uncertainty set. Such uncertainty, referred to as epistemic…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-11-02 Murat Cubuktepe , Nils Jansen , Sebastian Junges , Ahmadreza Marandi , Marnix Suilen , Ufuk Topcu

We study data-driven learning of robust stochastic control for infinite-horizon systems with potentially continuous state and action spaces. In many managerial settings--supply chains, finance, manufacturing, services, and dynamic…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-11-18 Shengbo Wang , Jason Meng , Nian Si , Jose Blanchet , Zhengyuan Zhou

In this paper we consider a control problem for a Partially Observable Piecewise Deterministic Markov Process of the following type: After the jump of the process the controller receives a noisy signal about the state and the aim is to…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-07-21 Nicole Bäuerle , Dirk Lange

In many practical settings control decisions must be made under partial/imperfect information about the evolution of a relevant state variable. Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) is a relatively well-developed framework…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-30 Yanling Chang , Alfredo Garcia , Zhide Wang , Lu Sun

In this paper, we use concepts from supervisory control theory of discrete event systems to propose a method to learn optimal control policies for a finite-state Markov Decision Process (MDP) in which (only) certain sequences of actions are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-04 Arun Raman , Keerthan Shagrithaya , Shalabh Bhatnagar

This paper deals with the question of how to most effectively conduct experiments in Partially Observed Markov Decision Processes so as to provide data that is most informative about a parameter of interest. Methods from Markov decision…

Other Statistics · Statistics 2018-01-31 Leifur Thorbergsson , Giles Hooker

We are interested in enabling autonomous agents to learn and reason about systems with hidden states, such as locking mechanisms. We cast this problem as learning the parameters of a discrete Partially Observable Markov Decision Process…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Seiji Shaw , Travis Manderson , Chad Kessens , Nicholas Roy

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-27 Yassir Jedra , Junghyun Lee , Alexandre Proutière , Se-Young Yun

In this work, we study dynamic programming (DP) algorithms for partially observable Markov decision processes with jointly continuous and discrete state-spaces. We consider a class of stochastic systems which have coupled discrete and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-03-07 Donghwan Lee , Niao He , Jianghai Hu

Policy gradient methods are widely used in reinforcement learning. Yet, the nonconvexity of policy optimization poses significant challenges in understanding the global convergence of policy gradient methods. For a class of finite-horizon…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-10 Xin Chen , Yifan Hu , Minda Zhao

We study the offline data-driven sequential decision making problem in the framework of Markov decision process (MDP). In order to enhance the generalizability and adaptivity of the learned policy, we propose to evaluate each policy by a…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2021-11-11 Zhengling Qi , Peng Liao

Intelligent agents can cope with sensory-rich environments by learning task-agnostic state abstractions. In this paper, we propose an algorithm to approximate causal states, which are the coarsest partition of the joint history of actions…

We consider the joint design and control of discrete-time stochastic dynamical systems over a finite time horizon. We formulate the problem as a multi-step optimization problem under uncertainty seeking to identify a system design and a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-07 Adrien Bolland , Ioannis Boukas , Mathias Berger , Damien Ernst

Most reinforcement learning methods are based upon the key assumption that the transition dynamics and reward functions are fixed, that is, the underlying Markov decision process is stationary. However, in many real-world applications, this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-23 Yash Chandak , Georgios Theocharous , Shiv Shankar , Martha White , Sridhar Mahadevan , Philip S. Thomas

Partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) model specific environments in sequential decision-making under uncertainty. Critically, optimal policies for POMDPs may not be robust against perturbations in the environment.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-08-21 Maris F. L. Galesloot , Roman Andriushchenko , Milan Češka , Sebastian Junges , Nils Jansen

Policy gradient (PG) methods are successful approaches to deal with continuous reinforcement learning (RL) problems. They learn stochastic parametric (hyper)policies by either exploring in the space of actions or in the space of parameters.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-31 Alessandro Montenegro , Marco Mussi , Alberto Maria Metelli , Matteo Papini

In this paper, we study numerical approximations for optimal control of a class of stochastic partial differential equations with partial observations. The system state evolves in a Hilbert space, whereas observations are given in…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-04-02 Feng Bao , Yanzhao Cao , Hongjiang Qian

Partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) provide an elegant mathematical framework for modeling complex decision and planning problems in stochastic domains in which states of the system are observable only indirectly, via a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2011-06-02 M. Hauskrecht

Calculating optimal policies is known to be computationally difficult for Markov decision processes (MDPs) with Borel state and action spaces. This paper studies finite-state approximations of discrete time Markov decision processes with…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2016-09-23 Naci Saldi , Serdar Yüksel , Tamás Linder