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Related papers: Topological Value Iteration Algorithms

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Algorithms developed under stationary Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) often face challenges in non-stationary environments, and infinite-horizon formulations may not directly apply to finite-horizon tasks. To address these limitations, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-03 Zhizuo Chen , Theodore T. Allen

Policy Iteration (PI) is a widely used family of algorithms to compute optimal policies for Markov Decision Problems (MDPs). We derive upper bounds on the running time of PI on Deterministic MDPs (DMDPs): the class of MDPs in which every…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2023-10-10 Ritesh Goenka , Eashan Gupta , Sushil Khyalia , Pratyush Agarwal , Mulinti Shaik Wajid , Shivaram Kalyanakrishnan

We study value-iteration (VI) algorithms for solving general (a.k.a. multichain) Markov decision processes (MDPs) under the average-reward criterion, a fundamental but theoretically challenging setting. Beyond the difficulties inherent to…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-23 Matthew Zurek , Yudong Chen

Howard's Policy Iteration (HPI) is a classic algorithm for solving Markov Decision Problems (MDPs). HPI uses a "greedy" switching rule to update from any non-optimal policy to a dominating one, iterating until an optimal policy is found.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-05 Dibyangshu Mukherjee , Shivaram Kalyanakrishnan

We study the problem of learning optimal policies in finite-horizon Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) using low-rank reinforcement learning (RL) methods. In finite-horizon MDPs, the policies, and therefore the value functions (VFs) are not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Sergio Rozada , Jose Luis Orejuela , Antonio G. Marques

We present a general framework for applying learning algorithms and heuristical guidance to the verification of Markov decision processes (MDPs). The primary goal of our techniques is to improve performance by avoiding an exhaustive…

Value Iteration Networks (VINs) have emerged as a popular method to incorporate planning algorithms within deep reinforcement learning, enabling performance improvements on tasks requiring long-range reasoning and understanding of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-08 Andreea Deac , Petar Veličković , Ognjen Milinković , Pierre-Luc Bacon , Jian Tang , Mladen Nikolić

The Partially Observable Markov Decision Process has long been recognized as a rich framework for real-world planning and control problems, especially in robotics. However exact solutions in this framework are typically computationally…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2011-10-05 J. Pineau , G. Gordon , S. Thrun

Motivated from Bertsekas' recent study on policy iteration (PI) for solving the problems of infinite-horizon discounted Markov decision processes (MDPs) in an on-line setting, we develop an off-line PI integrated with a multi-policy…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-12-07 Hyeong Soo Chang

The question of knowing whether the policy Iteration algorithm (PI) for solving Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) has exponential or (strongly) polynomial complexity has attracted much attention in the last 50 years. Recently, Fearnley…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2011-08-19 Romain Hollanders , Jean-Charles Delvenne , Raphaël Jungers

We consider a class of optimization problems over stochastic variables where the algorithm can learn information about the value of any variable through a series of costly steps; we model this information acquisition process as a Markov…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2025-07-25 Shuchi Chawla , Dimitris Christou , Amit Harlev , Ziv Scully

Policy Iteration (PI) is a classical family of algorithms to compute an optimal policy for any given Markov Decision Problem (MDP). The basic idea in PI is to begin with some initial policy and to repeatedly update the policy to one from an…

We study the problem of learning policies that maximize cumulative reward while satisfying safety constraints, even when the real environment differs from a simulator or nominal model. We focus on robust constrained Markov decision…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-12 Sourav Ganguly , Arnob Ghosh

In the context of railway systems, the application performance can be very critical and the radio conditions not advantageous. Hence, the communication problem parameters include both a survival time stemming from the application layer and…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2023-03-22 Vincent Corlay , Jean-Christophe Sibel

The solution convergence of Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) can be accelerated by prioritized sweeping of states ranked by their potential impacts to other states. In this paper, we present new heuristics to speed up the solution…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-01-07 Shoubhik Debnath , Lantao Liu , Gaurav Sukhatme

We study episodic reinforcement learning in non-stationary linear (a.k.a. low-rank) Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), i.e, both the reward and transition kernel are linear with respect to a given feature map and are allowed to evolve either…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-28 Ahmed Touati , Pascal Vincent

We present a technique for speeding up the convergence of value iteration for partially observable Markov decisions processes (POMDPs). The underlying idea is similar to that behind modified policy iteration for fully observable Markov…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2013-01-30 Nevin Lianwen Zhang , Stephen S. Lee , Weihong Zhang

We present a novel POMDP planning algorithm called heuristic search value iteration (HSVI).HSVI is an anytime algorithm that returns a policy and a provable bound on its regret with respect to the optimal policy. HSVI gets its power by…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2012-07-19 Trey Smith , Reid Simmons

Robust Markov decision processes (MDPs) allow to compute reliable solutions for dynamic decision problems whose evolution is modeled by rewards and partially-known transition probabilities. Unfortunately, accounting for uncertainty in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-18 Chin Pang Ho , Marek Petrik , Wolfram Wiesemann

Learning a Markov Decision Process (MDP) from a fixed batch of trajectories is a non-trivial task whose outcome's quality depends on both the amount and the diversity of the sampled regions of the state-action space. Yet, many MDPs are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-08 Giorgio Angelotti , Nicolas Drougard , Caroline P. C. Chanel