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Planning problems where effects of actions are non-deterministic can be modeled as Markov decision processes. Planning problems are usually goal-directed. This paper proposes several techniques for exploiting the goal-directedness to…
We consider killed Markov decision processes for countable models on a finite time-interval. Existence of a uniform $\varepsilon$-optimal policy is proven. We show the correctness of the fundamental equation. The optimal control problem is…
Model-free reinforcement learning is known to be memory and computation efficient and more amendable to large scale problems. In this paper, two model-free algorithms are introduced for learning infinite-horizon average-reward Markov…
Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) have been used to formulate many decision-making problems in science and engineering. The objective is to synthesize the best decision (action selection) policies to maximize expected rewards (or minimize…
The goal of this paper is to analyze distributional Markov Decision Processes as a class of control problems in which the objective is to learn policies that steer the distribution of a cumulative reward toward a prescribed target law,…
A crucial problem in reinforcement learning is learning the optimal policy. We study this in tabular infinite-horizon discounted Markov decision processes under the online setting. The existing algorithms either fail to achieve regret…
Markov automata combine non-determinism, probabilistic branching, and exponentially distributed delays. This compositional variant of continuous-time Markov decision processes is used in reliability engineering, performance evaluation and…
We consider the problem of optimally designing a system for repeated use under uncertainty. We develop a modeling framework that integrates design and operational phases, which are represented by a mixed-integer program and discounted-cost…
Markov decision processes (MDPs) are standard models for probabilistic systems with non-deterministic behaviours. Mean payoff (or long-run average reward) provides a mathematically elegant formalism to express performance related…
We study optimal control of Markov processes with age-dependent transition rates. The control policy is chosen continuously over time based on the state of the process and its age. We study infinite horizon discounted cost and infinite…
For continuing tasks, average cost Markov decision processes have well-documented value and can be solved using efficient algorithms. However, it explicitly assumes that the agent is risk-neutral. In this work, we extend risk-neutral…
This paper shows that the optimal policy and value functions of a Markov Decision Process (MDP), either discounted or not, can be captured by a finite-horizon undiscounted Optimal Control Problem (OCP), even if based on an inexact model.…
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,…
We consider a control problem for a finite-state Markov system whose performance is evaluated by a coherent Markov risk measure. For each policy, the risk of a state is approximated by a function of its features, thus leading to a…
This paper deals with the general discounted impulse control problem of a piecewise deterministic Markov process. We investigate a new family of epsilon-optimal strategies. The construction of such strategies is explicit and only…
We study a new model-free algorithm to compute $\varepsilon$-optimal policies for average reward Markov decision processes, in the weakly communicating case. Given a generative model, our procedure combines a recursive sampling technique…
Relational Markov Decision Processes are a useful abstraction for complex reinforcement learning problems and stochastic planning problems. Recent work developed representation schemes and algorithms for planning in such problems using the…
Markov decision processes (MDPs) are the defacto frame-work for sequential decision making in the presence ofstochastic uncertainty. A classical optimization criterion forMDPs is to maximize the expected discounted-sum pay-off, which…
We study the problem of learning Markov decision processes with finite state and action spaces when the transition probability distributions and loss functions are chosen adversarially and are allowed to change with time. We introduce an…
We study reinforcement learning for continuous-time Markov decision processes (MDPs) in the finite-horizon episodic setting. In contrast to discrete-time MDPs, the inter-transition times of a continuous-time MDP are exponentially…