Related papers: Smart Sampling for Lightweight Verification of Mar…

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.…

The preferential sampling of locations chosen to observe a spatio-temporal process has been identified as a major problem across multiple fields. Predictions of the process can be severely biased when standard statistical methodologies are…

Factored Markov decision processes (MDPs) are a prominent paradigm within the artificial intelligence community for modeling and solving large-scale MDPs whose rewards and dynamics decompose into smaller, loosely interacting components.…

Sampling from complicated probability distributions is a hard computational problem arising in many fields, including statistical physics, optimization, and machine learning. Quantum computers have recently been used to sample from…

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are often used for approximate inference inside learning, but their slow mixing can be difficult to diagnose and the approximations can seriously degrade learning. To alleviate these issues, we…

The curse of dimensionality is a widely known issue in reinforcement learning (RL). In the tabular setting where the state space $\mathcal{S}$ and the action space $\mathcal{A}$ are both finite, to obtain a nearly optimal policy with…

We consider Markov decision processes (MDP) as generators of sequences of probability distributions over states. A probability distribution is p-synchronizing if the probability mass is at least p in a single state, or in a given set of…

Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), as a general-purpose framework, often overlook the benefits of incorporating the causal structure of the transition and reward dynamics. For a subclass of resource allocation problems, we introduce the…

We consider conditional tests for non-negative discrete exponential families. We develop two Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms which allow us to sample from the conditional space and to perform approximated tests. The first…

Cyber-physical systems (CPSs) are naturally modelled as reactive systems with nondeterministic and probabilistic dynamics. Model-based verification techniques have proved effective in the deployment of safety-critical CPSs. Central for a…

We introduce Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms based on numerical approximations of piecewise-deterministic Markov processes obtained with the framework of splitting schemes. We present unadjusted as well as adjusted algorithms,…

The goal of a traditional Markov decision process (MDP) is to maximize expected cumulative reward over a defined horizon (possibly infinite). In many applications, however, a decision maker may be interested in optimizing a specific…

This paper investigates the optimization problem of an infinite stage discrete time Markov decision process (MDP) with a long-run average metric considering both mean and variance of rewards together. Such performance metric is important…

We consider qualitative strategy synthesis for the formalism called consumption Markov decision processes. This formalism can model dynamics of an agents that operates under resource constraints in a stochastic environment. The presented…

Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) are the standard framework for decision-making under uncertainty. While sampling-based methods scale well, they lack formal correctness guarantees, making them unsuitable for…

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) techniques have long been studied in computational geometry subjects whereabouts the problems to be studied are complex geometric objects which by their nature require optimized techniques to be deployed or…

Recent research in decision theoretic planning has focussed on making the solution of Markov decision processes (MDPs) more feasible. We develop a family of algorithms for structured reachability analysis of MDPs that are suitable when an…

Computing systems interacting with real-world processes must safely and reliably process uncertain data. The Monte Carlo method is a popular approach for computing with such uncertain values. This article introduces a framework for…

Regularization of control policies using entropy can be instrumental in adjusting predictability of real-world systems. Applications benefiting from such approaches range from, e.g., cybersecurity, which aims at maximal unpredictability, to…

Drawing a sample from a discrete distribution is one of the building components for Monte Carlo methods. Like other sampling algorithms, discrete sampling suffers from the high computational burden in large-scale inference problems. We…