Related papers: Clustering Markov Decision Processes For Continual…
We present a method for a certain class of Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) that can relate the optimal policy back to one or more reward sources in the environment. For a given initial state, without fully computing the value function,…
We develop a generic policy gradient method with the global optimality guarantee for robust Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). While policy gradient methods are widely used for solving dynamic decision problems due to their scalable and…
We study computational and statistical aspects of learning Latent Markov Decision Processes (LMDPs). In this model, the learner interacts with an MDP drawn at the beginning of each epoch from an unknown mixture of MDPs. To sidestep known…
This paper studies average-cost Markov decision processes with semi-uniform Feller transition probabilities. This class of MDPs was recently introduced by the authors to study MDPs with incomplete information. This paper studies the…
Transfer reinforcement learning aims to improve the sample efficiency of solving unseen new tasks by leveraging experiences obtained from previous tasks. We consider the setting where all tasks (MDPs) share the same environment dynamic…
The problem of offline reinforcement learning focuses on learning a good policy from a log of environment interactions. Past efforts for developing algorithms in this area have revolved around introducing constraints to online reinforcement…
We revisit the identification of an $\varepsilon$-optimal policy in average-reward Markov Decision Processes (MDP). In such MDPs, two measures of complexity have appeared in the literature: the diameter, $D$, and the optimal bias span, $H$,…
This paper presents two new approaches to decomposing and solving large Markov decision problems (MDPs), a partial decoupling method and a complete decoupling method. In these approaches, a large, stochastic decision problem is divided into…
This paper studies the problem of data collection for policy evaluation in Markov decision processes (MDPs). In policy evaluation, we are given a target policy and asked to estimate the expected cumulative reward it will obtain in an…
This paper discusses the functional stability of closed-loop Markov Chains under optimal policies resulting from a discounted optimality criterion, forming Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). We investigate the stability of MDPs in the sense…
In data-driven decision-making in marketing, healthcare, and education, it is desirable to utilize a large amount of data from existing ventures to navigate high-dimensional feature spaces and address data scarcity in new ventures. We…
This paper studies the policy mirror descent (PMD) method, which is a general policy optimization framework in reinforcement learning and can cover a wide range of policy gradient methods by specifying difference mirror maps. Existing…
Transfer learning significantly accelerates the reinforcement learning process by exploiting relevant knowledge from previous experiences. The problem of optimally selecting source policies during the learning process is of great importance…
In this paper, we consider risk-sensitive Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with Borel state and action spaces and unbounded cost under both finite and infinite planning horizons. Our optimality criterion is based on the recursive…
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…
In this work we investigate an importance sampling approach for evaluating policies for a structurally time-varying factored Markov decision process (MDP), i.e. the policy's value is estimated with a high-probability confidence interval. In…
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…
We prove new upper and lower bounds for sample complexity of finding an $\epsilon$-optimal policy of an infinite-horizon average-reward Markov decision process (MDP) given access to a generative model. When the mixing time of the…
Algorithmic decisions made by machine learning models in high-stakes domains may have lasting impacts over time. However, naive applications of standard fairness criterion in static settings over temporal domains may lead to delayed and…
In this paper, we consider solving discounted Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) under the constraint that the resulting policy is stabilizing. In practice MDPs are solved based on some form of policy approximation. We will leverage recent…