Related papers: An axiomatic approach to Markov decision processes
Decision-making problems in uncertain or stochastic domains are often formulated as Markov decision processes (MDPs). Policy iteration (PI) is a popular algorithm for searching over policy-space, the size of which is exponential in the…
We present a dynamic programming-based solution to a stochastic optimal control problem up to a hitting time for a discrete-time Markov control process. Firstly, we determine an optimal control policy to steer the process toward a compact…
Policy gradient methods are among the most effective methods in challenging reinforcement learning problems with large state and/or action spaces. However, little is known about even their most basic theoretical convergence properties,…
In many practical sequential decision-making problems, tracking the state of the environment incurs a sensing/communication/computation cost. In these settings, the agent's interaction with its environment includes the additional component…
In this paper, we present an optimal control problem for stochastic differential games under Markov regime-switching forward-backward stochastic differential equations with jumps and partial information. First, we prove a sufficient maximum…
Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) have been used to formulate many decision-making problems in science and engineering. The objective is to synthesize the best decision (action selection) policies to maximize expected rewards (minimize…
This work considers two-player zero-sum semi-Markov games with incomplete information on one side and perfect observation. At the beginning, the system selects a game type according to a given probability distribution and informs to Player…
In robust Markov decision processes (MDPs), the uncertainty in the transition kernel is addressed by finding a policy that optimizes the worst-case performance over an uncertainty set of MDPs. While much of the literature has focused on…
We prove that the simplex method with the highest gain/most-negative-reduced cost pivoting rule converges in strongly polynomial time for deterministic Markov decision processes (MDPs) regardless of the discount factor. For a deterministic…
Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) offer a fairly generic and powerful framework to discuss the notion of optimal policies for dynamic systems, in particular when the dynamics are stochastic. However, computing the optimal policy of an MDP…
We consider a discrete-time Markov decision process with Borel state and action spaces. The performance criterion is to maximize a total expected {utility determined by unbounded return function. It is shown the existence of optimal…
We address the problem of policy evaluation in discounted Markov decision processes, and provide instance-dependent guarantees on the $\ell_\infty$-error under a generative model. We establish both asymptotic and non-asymptotic versions of…
This paper investigates the two-person zero-sum stochastic games for piece-wise deterministic Markov decision processes with risk-sensitive finite-horizon cost criterion on a general state space. Here, the transition and cost/reward rates…
Gradient-based algorithms are one of the methods of choice for the optimisation of Markov Decision Processes. In this article we will present a novel approximate Newton algorithm for the optimisation of such models. The algorithm has…
We consider the problem of computing the value and an optimal strategy for minimizing the expected termination time in one-counter Markov decision processes. Since the value may be irrational and an optimal strategy may be rather…
In most common settings of Markov Decision Process (MDP), an agent evaluate a policy based on expectation of (discounted) sum of rewards. However in many applications this criterion might not be suitable from two perspective: first, in risk…
Starting from the Avellaneda-Stoikov framework, we consider a market maker who wants to optimally set bid/ask quotes over a finite time horizon, to maximize her expected utility. The intensities of the orders she receives depend not only on…
Discounted algorithms often encounter evaluation errors due to their reliance on short-term estimations, which can impede their efficacy in addressing simple, short-term tasks and impose undesired temporal discounts (\(\gamma\)).…
Computing optimal conditional reachability probabilities in Markov decision processes (MDPs) is tractable by a reduction to reachability probabilities. Yet, this reduction yields cyclic, challenging MDPs that are often notoriously hard to…
Euclidean Markov decision processes are a powerful tool for modeling control problems under uncertainty over continuous domains. Finite state imprecise, Markov decision processes can be used to approximate the behavior of these infinite…