Related papers: Undiscounted optimal stopping with unbounded rewar…

An important step in the Markov reward approach to error bounds on stationary performance measures of Markov chains is to bound the bias terms. Affine functions have been successfully used for these bounds for various models, but there are…

We study an optimal process control problem with multiple assignable causes. The process is initially in-control but is subject to random transition to one of multiple out-of-control states due to assignable causes. The objective is to find…

Following the risk-taking model of Seel and Strack, $n$ players decide when to stop privately observed Brownian motions with drift and absorption at zero. They are then ranked according to their level of stopping and paid a rank-dependent…

We consider infinite-horizon $\gamma$-discounted Markov Decision Processes, for which it is known that there exists a stationary optimal policy. We consider the algorithm Value Iteration and the sequence of policies $\pi_1,...,\pi_k$ it…

For a Markov decision process with countably infinite states, the optimal value may not be achievable in the set of stationary policies. In this paper, we study the existence conditions of an optimal stationary policy in a countable-state…

We consider the problem of optimally stopping a general one-dimensional stochastic differential equation (SDE) with generalised drift over an infinite time horizon. First, we derive a complete characterisation of the solution to this…

Sequential Bayesian experimental design typically assumes that the number of experiments is fixed before data collection begins. In practical campaigns, however, experimentation may need to terminate early because additional measurements…

In a classical optimal stopping problem the aim is to maximize the expected value of a functional of a diffusion evaluated at a stopping time. This note considers optimal stopping problems beyond this paradigm. We study problems in which…

The Receding Horizon Control (RHC) strategy consists in replacing an infinite-horizon stabilization problem by a sequence of finite-horizon optimal control problems, which are numerically more tractable. The dynamic programming principle…

Robbins' problem of optimal stopping asks one to minimise the expected {\it rank} of observation chosen by some nonanticipating stopping rule. We settle a conjecture regarding the {\it value} of the stopped variable under the rule optimal…

In this paper, we propose an extension of the forward improvement iteration algorithm, originally introduced in Irle (2006) and recently reconsidered in Miclo and Villeneuve (2021). The main new ingredient is a flexible window parameter…

We study optimal stopping problems related to the pricing of perpetual American options in an extension of the Black-Merton-Scholes model in which the dividend and volatility rates of the underlying risky asset depend on the running values…

This paper considers a distributed stochastic optimization problem where the goal is to minimize the time average of a cost function subject to a set of constraints on the time averages of a related stochastic processes called penalties. We…

We first study an optimal stopping problem in which a player (an agent) uses a discrete stopping time in order to stop optimally a payoff process whose risk is evaluated by a (non-linear) $g$-expectation. We then consider a non-zero-sum…

We are interested in risk constraints for infinite horizon discrete time Markov decision processes (MDPs). Starting with average reward MDPs, we show that increasing concave stochastic dominance constraints on the empirical distribution of…

In this paper, we develop new optional stopping theorems for scenarios where the stopping rules are defined by bounded continuity regions. Moreover, we establish a wide variety of inequalities on the supremums and infimums of functions of…

We consider Backward Stochastic Differential Equations in a setting where noise is generated by a countable state, continuous time Markov chain, and the terminal value is prescribed at a stopping time. We show that, given sufficient…

In reinforcement learning, we typically aim to optimize the expected value of the sum of rewards an agent collects over a trajectory. However, if the process generating these rewards is non-ergodic, the expected value, i.e., the average…

We propose a novel constrained reinforcement learning method for finding optimal policies in Markov Decision Processes while satisfying temporal logic constraints with a desired probability throughout the learning process. An…

Reward is the driving force for reinforcement-learning agents. This paper is dedicated to understanding the expressivity of reward as a way to capture tasks that we would want an agent to perform. We frame this study around three new…