Related papers: An Analysis of Primal-Dual Algorithms for Discount…
In many operations management problems, we need to make decisions sequentially to minimize the cost while satisfying certain constraints. One modeling approach to study such problems is constrained Markov decision process (CMDP). When…
We study the problem of computing deterministic optimal policies for constrained Markov decision processes (MDPs) with continuous state and action spaces, which are widely encountered in constrained dynamical systems. Designing…
The problem of constrained Markov decision process (CMDP) is investigated, where an agent aims to maximize the expected accumulated discounted reward subject to multiple constraints on its utilities/costs. A new primal-dual approach is…
The paper studies a distributed constrained optimization problem, where multiple agents connected in a network collectively minimize the sum of individual objective functions subject to a global constraint being an intersection of the local…
We propose a novel randomized linear programming algorithm for approximating the optimal policy of the discounted Markov decision problem. By leveraging the value-policy duality and binary-tree data structures, the algorithm adaptively…
This note summarizes the optimization formulations used in the study of Markov decision processes. We consider both the discounted and undiscounted processes under the standard and the entropy-regularized settings. For each setting, we…
We address the problem of finding the optimal policy of a constrained Markov decision process (CMDP) using a gradient descent-based algorithm. Previous results have shown that a primal-dual approach can achieve an $\mathcal{O}(1/\sqrt{T})$…
This paper introduces a novel approach to contextual stochastic optimization, integrating operations research and machine learning to address decision-making under uncertainty. Traditional methods often fail to leverage contextual…
Recent advances in Rate-Distortion-Perception (RDP) theory highlight the importance of balancing compression level, reconstruction quality, and perceptual fidelity. While previous work has explored numerical approaches to approximate the…
In this paper we provide faster algorithms for approximately solving discounted Markov Decision Processes in multiple parameter regimes. Given a discounted Markov Decision Process (DMDP) with $|S|$ states, $|A|$ actions, discount factor…
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…
We consider the problem of a firm seeking to use personalized pricing to sell an exogenously given stock of a product over a finite selling horizon to different consumer types. We assume that the type of an arriving consumer can be observed…
Optimization methods are at the core of many problems in signal/image processing, computer vision, and machine learning. For a long time, it has been recognized that looking at the dual of an optimization problem may drastically simplify…
We study a primal-dual (PD) reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm for online constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs). Despite its widespread practical use, the existing theoretical literature on PD-RL algorithms for this problem only…
We study the Constrained Convex Markov Decision Process (MDP), where the goal is to minimize a convex functional of the visitation measure, subject to a convex constraint. Designing algorithms for a constrained convex MDP faces several…
We study the problem of computing an optimal policy of an infinite-horizon discounted constrained Markov decision process (constrained MDP). Despite the popularity of Lagrangian-based policy search methods used in practice, the oscillation…
We propose a new stochastic primal-dual optimization algorithm for planning in a large discounted Markov decision process with a generative model and linear function approximation. Assuming that the feature map approximately satisfies…
Dynamic Programming (DP) provides standard algorithms to solve Markov Decision Processes. However, these algorithms generally do not optimize a scalar objective function. In this paper, we draw connections between DP and (constrained)…
We study the online estimation of the optimal policy of a Markov decision process (MDP). We propose a class of Stochastic Primal-Dual (SPD) methods which exploit the inherent minimax duality of Bellman equations. The SPD methods update a…
We present a primal-dual algorithmic framework to obtain approximate solutions to a prototypical constrained convex optimization problem, and rigorously characterize how common structural assumptions affect the numerical efficiency. Our…