Related papers: Data-Efficient Policy Evaluation Through Behavior …
Guided policy search algorithms can be used to optimize complex nonlinear policies, such as deep neural networks, without directly computing policy gradients in the high-dimensional parameter space. Instead, these methods use supervised…
An informative measurement is the most efficient way to gain information about an unknown state. We present a first-principles derivation of a general-purpose dynamic programming algorithm that returns an optimal sequence of informative…
Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) are stochastic optimization problems that model situations where a decision maker controls a system based on its state. Partially observed Markov decision processes (POMDPs) are generalizations of MDPs where…
Markov decision processes (MDPs) provide a fundamental model for sequential decision making under process uncertainty. A classical synthesis task is to compute for a given MDP a winning policy that achieves a desired specification. However,…
We present a general framework for applying learning algorithms and heuristical guidance to the verification of Markov decision processes (MDPs). The primary goal of our techniques is to improve performance by avoiding an exhaustive…
We consider the problem of computing optimal policies in average-reward Markov decision processes. This classical problem can be formulated as a linear program directly amenable to saddle-point optimization methods, albeit with a number of…
We consider the infinite-horizon discounted optimal control problem formalized by Markov Decision Processes. We focus on Policy Search algorithms, that compute an approximately optimal policy by following the standard Policy Iteration (PI)…
Much recent research in decision theoretic planning has adopted Markov decision processes (MDPs) as the model of choice, and has attempted to make their solution more tractable by exploiting problem structure. One particular algorithm,…
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…
Continuous-time Markov decision processes are an important class of models in a wide range of applications, ranging from cyber-physical systems to synthetic biology. A central problem is how to devise a policy to control the system in order…
Solving partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) is highly intractable in general, at least in part because the optimal policy may be infinitely large. In this paper, we explore the problem of finding the optimal policy from…
One often encounters the curse of dimensionality in the application of dynamic programming to determine optimal policies for controlled Markov chains. In this paper, we provide a method to construct sub-optimal policies along with a bound…
Policy-based algorithms are among the most widely adopted techniques in model-free RL, thanks to their strong theoretical groundings and good properties in continuous action spaces. Unfortunately, these methods require precise and…
When human operators of cyber-physical systems encounter surprising behavior, they often consider multiple hypotheses that might explain it. In some cases, taking information-gathering actions such as additional measurements or control…
We present the first finite time global convergence analysis of policy gradient in the context of infinite horizon average reward Markov decision processes (MDPs). Specifically, we focus on ergodic tabular MDPs with finite state and action…
Advances in mobile computing technologies have made it possible to monitor and apply data-driven interventions across complex systems in real time. Markov decision processes (MDPs) are the primary model for sequential decision problems with…
In this work, we consider a cooperative multi-agent Markov decision process (MDP) involving m agents. At each decision epoch, all the m agents independently select actions in order to maximize a common long-term objective. In the policy…
In many real-world decision problems there is partially observed, hidden or latent information that remains fixed throughout an interaction. Such decision problems can be modeled as Latent Markov Decision Processes (LMDPs), where a latent…
Within the framework of probably approximately correct Markov decision processes (PAC-MDP), much theoretical work has focused on methods to attain near optimality after a relatively long period of learning and exploration. However,…
We study the problem of computing deterministic optimal policies for constrained Markov decision processes (MDPs) with continuous state and action spaces, which are widely encountered in constrained dynamical systems. Designing…