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We present a method for solving implicit (factored) Markov decision processes (MDPs) with very large state spaces. We introduce a property of state space partitions which we call epsilon-homogeneity. Intuitively, an epsilon-homogeneous…
Recent development of Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has demonstrated superior performance of neural networks in solving challenging problems with large or even continuous state spaces. One specific approach is to deploy neural networks…
This paper addresses objectives tailored to the risk-averse optimization of accumulated rewards in Markov decision processes (MDPs). The studied objectives require maximizing the expected value of the accumulated rewards minus a penalty…
Calculating optimal policies is known to be computationally difficult for Markov decision processes (MDPs) with Borel state and action spaces. This paper studies finite-state approximations of discrete time Markov decision processes with…
Control applications often feature tasks with similar, but not identical, dynamics. We introduce the Hidden Parameter Markov Decision Process (HiP-MDP), a framework that parametrizes a family of related dynamical systems with a…
Autonomous agents are limited in their ability to observe the world state. Partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) formally model the problem of planning under world state uncertainty, but POMDPs with continuous actions and…
Multi-model Markov decision process (MMDP) is a promising framework for computing policies that are robust to parameter uncertainty in MDPs. MMDPs aim to find a policy that maximizes the expected return over a distribution of MDP models.…
In this paper, a convex optimization-based method is proposed for numerically solving dynamic programs in continuous state and action spaces. The key idea is to approximate the output of the Bellman operator at a particular state by the…
We study the Patient Assignment Scheduling (PAS) problem in a random environment that arises in the management of patient flow in the hospital systems, due to the stochastic nature of the arrivals as well as the Length of Stay distribution.…
We study the problem of zero-delay coding for the transmission of a Markov source over a noisy channel with feedback and present a reinforcement learning solution which is guaranteed to achieve near-optimality. To this end, we formulate the…
We consider finite model approximations of discrete-time partially observed Markov decision processes (POMDPs) under the discounted cost criterion. After converting the original partially observed stochastic control problem to a fully…
The semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxation has proven to be extremely strong for many hard discrete optimization problems. This is in particular true for the quadratic assignment problem (QAP), arguably one of the hardest NP-hard…
We study model-based learning of finite-window policies in tabular partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs). A common approach to learning under partial observability is to approximate unbounded history dependencies using…
We consider a constrained Markov Decision Problem (CMDP) where the goal of an agent is to maximize the expected discounted sum of rewards over an infinite horizon while ensuring that the expected discounted sum of costs exceeds a certain…
Previous work on planning as active inference addresses finite horizon problems and solutions valid for online planning. We propose solving the general Stochastic Shortest-Path Markov Decision Process (SSP MDP) as probabilistic inference.…
To ensure the system stability of the $\bf{\mathcal{H}_{2}}$-guaranteed cost optimal decentralized control problem (ODC), an approximate semidefinite programming (SDP) problem is formulated based on the sparsity of the gain matrix of the…
In this paper, we aim to provide a comprehensive analysis on the linear rate convergence of the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) for solving linearly constrained convex composite optimization problems. Under a certain…
For solving pseudo-convex global optimization problems, we present a novel fully adaptive steepest descent method (or ASDM) without any hard-to-estimate parameters. For the step-size regulation in an $\varepsilon$-normalized direction, we…
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 is concerned with a data-driven technique for constructing finite Markov decision processes (MDPs) as finite abstractions of discrete-time stochastic control systems with unknown dynamics while providing formal closeness…