Related papers: Learning Finite-State Controllers for Partially Ob…
Partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) provide a modeling framework for autonomous decision making under uncertainty and imperfect sensing, e.g. robot manipulation and self-driving cars. However, optimal control of POMDPs…
In this paper, we consider Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with error states. Error states are those states entering which is undesirable or dangerous. We define the risk with respect to a policy as the probability of entering such a state…
We provide performance guarantees for a variant of simulation-based policy iteration for controlling Markov decision processes that involves the use of stochastic approximation algorithms along with state-of-the-art techniques that are…
We study offline Reinforcement Learning in large infinite-horizon discounted Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) when the reward and transition models are linearly realizable under a known feature map. Starting from the classic linear-program…
Despite its popularity in the reinforcement learning community, a provably convergent policy gradient method for continuous space-time control problems with nonlinear state dynamics has been elusive. This paper proposes proximal gradient…
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…
Memoryless and finite-memory policies offer a practical alternative for solving partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs), as they operate directly in the output space rather than in the high-dimensional belief space. However,…
Policy gradient methods are powerful reinforcement learning algorithms and have been demonstrated to solve many complex tasks. However, these methods are also data-inefficient, afflicted with high variance gradient estimates, and frequently…
We investigate the problem of monitoring partially observable systems with nondeterministic and probabilistic dynamics. In such systems, every state may be associated with a risk, e.g., the probability of an imminent crash. During runtime,…
General-purpose, intelligent, learning agents cycle through sequences of observations, actions, and rewards that are complex, uncertain, unknown, and non-Markovian. On the other hand, reinforcement learning is well-developed for small…
In this paper, we consider the finite-state approximation of a discrete-time constrained Markov decision process (MDP) under the discounted and average cost criteria. Using the linear programming formulation of the constrained discounted…
This paper investigates MDPs with intermittent state information. We consider a scenario where the controller perceives the state information of the process via an unreliable communication channel. The transmissions of state information…
We present on-line policy gradient algorithms for computing the locally optimal policy of a constrained, average cost, finite state Markov Decision Process. The stochastic approximation algorithms require estimation of the gradient of the…
Projected subgradient descent (PSD) has gained popularity for solving robust Markov decision processes (RMDPs) because it applies to a broader class of uncertainty sets than traditional dynamic programming. Existing work claims that RMDPs…
POMDPs capture a broad class of decision making problems, but hardness results suggest that learning is intractable even in simple settings due to the inherent partial observability. However, in many realistic problems, more information is…
A popular perspective in Reinforcement learning (RL) casts the problem as probabilistic inference on a graphical model of the Markov decision process (MDP). The core object of study is the probability of each state-action pair being visited…
Learning a near optimal policy in a partially observable system remains an elusive challenge in contemporary reinforcement learning. In this work, we consider episodic reinforcement learning in a reward-mixing Markov decision process (MDP).…
Multi-objective optimization models that encode ordered sequential constraints provide a solution to model various challenging problems including encoding preferences, modeling a curriculum, and enforcing measures of safety. A recently…
We present a multilevel stochastic gradient descent method for the optimal control of systems governed by partial differential equations under uncertain input data. The gradient descent method used to find the optimal control leverages a…
The problem of synthesizing stochastic explicit model predictive control policies is known to be quickly intractable even for systems of modest complexity when using classical control-theoretic methods. To address this challenge, we present…