Related papers: Data-Efficient Policy Evaluation Through Behavior …
We investigate the classical active pure exploration problem in Markov Decision Processes, where the agent sequentially selects actions and, from the resulting system trajectory, aims at identifying the best policy as fast as possible. We…
A diagnostic policy specifies what test to perform next, based on the results of previous tests, and when to stop and make a diagnosis. Cost-sensitive diagnostic policies perform tradeoffs between (a) the cost of tests and (b) the cost of…
We study the policy testing problem in discounted Markov decision processes (MDPs) in the fixed-confidence setting under a generative model with static sampling. The goal is to decide whether the value of a given policy exceeds a specified…
Markov decision processes (MDPs) are a popular model for performance analysis and optimization of stochastic systems. The parameters of stochastic behavior of MDPs are estimates from empirical observations of a system; their values are not…
We propose a new approach to the problem of searching a space of policies for a Markov decision process (MDP) or a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP), given a model. Our approach is based on the following observation: Any…
Dynamic optimization of mean and variance in Markov decision processes (MDPs) is a long-standing challenge caused by the failure of dynamic programming. In this paper, we propose a new approach to find the globally optimal policy for…
We study the offline data-driven sequential decision making problem in the framework of Markov decision process (MDP). In order to enhance the generalizability and adaptivity of the learned policy, we propose to evaluate each policy by a…
In this paper, we study safe data collection for the purpose of policy evaluation in tabular Markov decision processes (MDPs). In policy evaluation, we are given a \textit{target} policy and asked to estimate the expected cumulative reward…
In this paper, we consider a modified version of the control problem in a model free Markov decision process (MDP) setting with large state and action spaces. The control problem most commonly addressed in the contemporary literature is to…
Our goal is to compute a policy that guarantees improved return over a baseline policy even when the available MDP model is inaccurate. The inaccurate model may be constructed, for example, by system identification techniques when the true…
We investigate the problem of best policy identification in discounted linear Markov Decision Processes in the fixed confidence setting under a generative model. We first derive an instance-specific lower bound on the expected number of…
The standard formulation of Markov decision processes (MDPs) assumes that the agent's decisions are executed immediately. However, in numerous realistic applications such as robotics or healthcare, actions are performed with a delay whose…
We are witnessing an increasing use of data-driven predictive models to inform decisions. As decisions have implications for individuals and society, there is increasing pressure on decision makers to be transparent about their decision…
We propose and study a general framework for regularized Markov decision processes (MDPs) where the goal is to find an optimal policy that maximizes the expected discounted total reward plus a policy regularization term. The extant…
We provide performance guarantees for a variant of simulation-based policy iteration for controlling Markov decision processes that involves the use of stochastic approximation algorithms along with state-of-the-art techniques that are…
We consider the problem of off-policy evaluation in Markov decision processes. Off-policy evaluation is the task of evaluating the expected return of one policy with data generated by a different, behavior policy. Importance sampling is a…
Policy gradient methods in reinforcement learning update policy parameters by taking steps in the direction of an estimated gradient of policy value. In this paper, we consider the statistically efficient estimation of policy gradients from…
In most applications of model-based Markov decision processes, the parameters for the unknown underlying model are often estimated from the empirical data. Due to noise, the policy learnedfrom the estimated model is often far from the…
In this paper, we show how a simulated Markov decision process (MDP) built by the so-called \emph{baseline} policies, can be used to compute a different policy, namely the \emph{simulated optimal} policy, for which the performance of this…
Decentralized partially observable Markov decision processes (Dec-POMDPs) are rich models for cooperative decision-making under uncertainty, but are often intractable to solve optimally (NEXP-complete). The transition and observation…