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A standard objective in partially-observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) is to find a policy that maximizes the expected discounted-sum payoff. However, such policies may still permit unlikely but highly undesirable outcomes, which…
We study the synthesis of a policy in a Markov decision process (MDP) following which an agent reaches a target state in the MDP while minimizing its total discounted cost. The problem combines a reachability criterion with a discounted…
We consider Markov decision processes (MDPs) in which the transition probabilities and rewards belong to an uncertainty set parametrized by a collection of random variables. The probability distributions for these random parameters are…
Markov control algorithms that perform smooth, non-greedy updates of the policy have been shown to be very general and versatile, with policy gradient and Expectation Maximisation algorithms being particularly popular. For these algorithms,…
There are no computationally feasible algorithms that provide solutions to the finite horizon Risk-sensitive Constrained Markov Decision Process (Risk-CMDP) problem, even for problems with moderate horizon. With an aim to design the same,…
We study the optimization of the expected long-term reward in finite partially observable Markov decision processes over the set of stationary stochastic policies. In the case of deterministic observations, also known as state aggregation,…
We investigate the problem of optimal control synthesis for Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), addressing both qualitative and quantitative objectives. Specifically, we require the system to satisfy a qualitative task specified by a Linear…
We develop several new algorithms for learning Markov Decision Processes in an infinite-horizon average-reward setting with linear function approximation. Using the optimism principle and assuming that the MDP has a linear structure, we…
In this paper, we focus on formal synthesis of control policies for finite Markov decision processes with non-negative real-valued costs. We develop an algorithm to automatically generate a policy that guarantees the satisfaction of a…
Cumulative prospect theory (CPT) is the first theory for decision-making under uncertainty that combines full theoretical soundness and empirically realistic features [P.P. Wakker - Prospect theory: For risk and ambiguity, Page 2]. While…
In this paper, we consider the gradual-impulse control problem of continuous-time Markov decision processes, where the system performance is measured by the expectation of the exponential utility of the total cost. We prove, under very…
We consider the problem of planning with participation constraints introduced in [Zhang et al., 2022]. In this problem, a principal chooses actions in a Markov decision process, resulting in separate utilities for the principal and the…
We present metrics for measuring state similarity in Markov decision processes (MDPs) with infinitely many states, including MDPs with continuous state spaces. Such metrics provide a stable quantitative analogue of the notion of…
In this paper, for Markov decision processes (MDPs) with unbounded state spaces we present refined upper bounds presented in [Kara et. al. JMLR'23] on finite model approximation errors via optimizing the quantizers used for finite model…
Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs) are notably more complex to solve than standard MDPs due to the absence of universally optimal policies across all initial state distributions. This necessitates re-solving the CMDP whenever the…
This paper studies the problem of data collection for policy evaluation in Markov decision processes (MDPs). In policy evaluation, we are given a target policy and asked to estimate the expected cumulative reward it will obtain in an…
We address the problem of finding an optimal policy in a Markov decision process under a restricted policy class defined by the convex hull of a set of base policies. This problem is of great interest in applications in which a number of…
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…
We propose an algorithm for deterministic continuous Markov Decision Processes with sparse rewards that computes the optimal policy exactly with no dependency on the size of the state space. The algorithm has time complexity of $O( |R|^3…
This paper studies the optimization of Markov decision processes (MDPs) from a risk-seeking perspective, where the risk is measured by conditional value-at-risk (CVaR). The objective is to find a policy that maximizes the long-run CVaR of…