Related papers: Planning with Information-Processing Constraints a…
Learning-based control has attracted significant attention in recent years, especially for plants that are difficult to model based on first-principles. A key issue in learning-based control is how to make efficient use of data as the…
We introduce and study constrained Markov Decision Processes (cMDPs) with anytime constraints. An anytime constraint requires the agent to never violate its budget at any point in time, almost surely. Although Markovian policies are no…
Partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) form a prominent model for uncertainty in sequential decision making. We are interested in constructing algorithms with theoretical guarantees to determine whether the agent has a…
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…
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…
Practical reinforcement learning problems are often formulated as constrained Markov decision process (CMDP) problems, in which the agent has to maximize the expected return while satisfying a set of prescribed safety constraints. In this…
Markov decision processes (MDPs) are a popular model for decision-making in the presence of uncertainty. The conventional view of MDPs in verification treats them as state transformers with probabilities defined over sequences of states and…
We consider Markov decision processes (MDPs) with multiple limit-average (or mean-payoff) objectives. There exist two different views: (i) the expectation semantics, where the goal is to optimize the expected mean-payoff objective, and (ii)…
Reinforcement learning in environments with many action-state pairs is challenging. At issue is the number of episodes needed to thoroughly search the policy space. Most conventional heuristics address this search problem in a stochastic…
We consider a combined problem of teaming and scheduling of multi-skilled employees that have to perform jobs with uncertain qualification requirements. We propose two modeling approaches that generate solutions that are robust to possible…
Solving partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) with high dimensional and continuous observations, such as camera images, is required for many real life robotics and planning problems. Recent researches suggested machine…
Optimum designs for parameter estimation in generalized regression models are standardly based on the Fisher information matrix (cf. Atkinson et al (2014) for a recent exposition). The corresponding optimality criteria are related to the…
This paper addresses a key limitation in existing counterfactual inference methods for Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). Current approaches assume a specific causal model to make counterfactuals identifiable. However, there are usually many…
Relational Markov Decision Processes are a useful abstraction for complex reinforcement learning problems and stochastic planning problems. Recent work developed representation schemes and algorithms for planning in such problems using the…
Model-based reinforcement learning has the potential to be more sample efficient than model-free approaches. However, existing model-based methods are vulnerable to model bias, which leads to poor generalization and asymptotic performance…
While learning in an unknown Markov Decision Process (MDP), an agent should trade off exploration to discover new information about the MDP, and exploitation of the current knowledge to maximize the reward. Although the agent will…
Optimal decision-making presents a significant challenge for autonomous systems operating in uncertain, stochastic and time-varying environments. Environmental variability over time can significantly impact the system's optimal decision…
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…
This paper presents a hierarchical decision-making framework for autonomous systems operating under uncertainty, demonstrated through autonomous driving as a representative application. Surrounding agents are modeled using Hybrid Markov…
In many real-world problems, there is the possibility to configure, to a limited extent, some environmental parameters to improve the performance of a learning agent. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, Configurable Markov Decision…