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This paper investigates the two-person zero-sum stochastic games for piece-wise deterministic Markov decision processes with risk-sensitive finite-horizon cost criterion on a general state space. Here, the transition and cost/reward rates…
The paper investigates stochastic resource allocation problems with scarce, reusable resources and non-preemtive, time-dependent, interconnected tasks. This approach is a natural generalization of several standard resource management…
Markov decision processes (MDPs) are used to model a wide variety of applications ranging from game playing over robotics to finance. Their optimal policy typically maximizes the expected sum of rewards given at each step of the decision…
This paper studies a large number of homogeneous Markov decision processes where the transition probabilities and costs are coupled in the empirical distribution of states (also called mean-field). The state of each process is not known to…
The discrete class algorithm presented in this paper is an efficient simulation tool for stochastic processes governed by a reasonably small set of transition rates. The algorithm is presented, its performance compared to prevailing methods…
Robust Markov decision processes (RMDPs) extend standard Markov decision processes (MDPs) to account for uncertainty in the transition probabilities. RMDPs have an uncertainty set that defines a set of possible transition functions, each of…
In supervised learning, decision trees are valued for their interpretability and performance. While greedy decision tree algorithms like CART remain widely used due to their computational efficiency, they often produce sub-optimal solutions…
We report on work towards flexible algorithms for solving decision problems represented as influence diagrams. An algorithm is given to construct a tree structure for each decision node in an influence diagram. Each tree represents a…
Markov decision processes (MDPs) is viewed as an optimization of an objective function over certain linear operators over general function spaces. A new existence result is established for the existence of optimal policies in general MDPs,…
We consider the problem of designing a control policy for an infinite-horizon discounted cost Markov decision process $\mathcal{M}$ when we only have access to an approximate model $\hat{\mathcal{M}}$. How well does an optimal policy…
Motivated by many application problems, we consider Markov decision processes (MDPs) with a general loss function and unknown parameters. To mitigate the epistemic uncertainty associated with unknown parameters, we take a Bayesian approach…
In this paper we design a novel class of online distributed optimization algorithms leveraging control theoretical techniques. We start by focusing on quadratic costs, and assuming to know an internal model of their variation. In this…
In imitation learning, an agent learns how to behave in an environment with an unknown cost function by mimicking expert demonstrations. Existing imitation learning algorithms typically involve solving a sequence of planning or…
Value iteration is a commonly used and empirically competitive method in solving many Markov decision process problems. However, it is known that value iteration has only pseudo-polynomial complexity in general. We establish a somewhat…
This work studies a multi-agent Markov decision process (MDP) that can undergo agent dropout and the computation of policies for the post-dropout system based on control and sampling of the pre-dropout system. The central planner's…
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…
This paper considers a distributed decision-making approach for manufacturing task assignment and condition-based machine health maintenance. Our approach considers information sharing between the task assignment and health management…
Markov decision processes (MDPs) are used to model stochastic systems in many applications. Several efficient algorithms to compute optimal policies have been studied in the literature, including value iteration (VI) and policy iteration.…
General purpose intelligent learning agents cycle through (complex,non-MDP) sequences of observations, actions, and rewards. On the other hand, reinforcement learning is well-developed for small finite state Markov Decision Processes…
We propose a principled kernel-based policy iteration algorithm to solve the continuous-state Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). In contrast to most decision-theoretic planning frameworks, which assume fully known state transition models, we…