Related papers: Mean-Variance Optimization of Discrete Time Discou…

The window mean-payoff objective strengthens the classical mean-payoff objective by computing the mean-payoff over a finite window that slides along an infinite path. Two variants have been considered: in one variant, the maximum window…

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…

Recently, Sidford, Wang, Wu and Ye (2018) developed an algorithm combining variance reduction techniques with value iteration to solve discounted Markov decision processes. This algorithm has a sublinear complexity when the discount factor…

In this paper, we consider solving discounted Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) under the constraint that the resulting policy is stabilizing. In practice MDPs are solved based on some form of policy approximation. We will leverage recent…

We study the minimization of a spectral risk measure of the total discounted cost generated by a Markov Decision Process (MDP) over a finite or infinite planning horizon. The MDP is assumed to have Borel state and action spaces and the cost…

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 (or minimize…

It is well known that for any finite state Markov decision process (MDP) there is a memoryless deterministic policy that maximizes the expected reward. For partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs), optimal memoryless policies…

This paper studies convergence properties of optimal values and actions for discounted and average-cost Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with weakly continuous transition probabilities and applies these properties to the stochastic…

This paper studies the influence of probabilism and non-determinism on some quantitative aspect X of the execution of a system modeled as a Markov decision process (MDP). To this end, the novel notion of demonic variance is introduced: For…

Interval Markov decision processes are a class of Markov models where the transition probabilities between the states belong to intervals. In this paper, we study the problem of efficient estimation of the optimal policies in Interval…

We study variance-dependent regret bounds for Markov decision processes (MDPs). Algorithms with variance-dependent regret guarantees can automatically exploit environments with low variance (e.g., enjoying constant regret on deterministic…

The paper addresses two variants of the stochastic shortest path problem ('optimize the accumulated weight until reaching a goal state') in Markov decision processes (MDPs) with integer weights. The first variant optimizes partial expected…

We consider the problem of constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP) where an agent interacts with a unichain Markov Decision Process. At every interaction, the agent obtains a reward. Further, there are $K$ cost functions. The agent aims…

This paper studies Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with atomless initial state distributions and atomless transition probabilities. Such MDPs are called atomless. The initial state distribution is considered to be fixed. We show that for…

The distributionally robust Markov Decision Process (MDP) approach asks for a distributionally robust policy that achieves the maximal expected total reward under the most adversarial distribution of uncertain parameters. In this paper, we…

We study the complexity of central controller synthesis problems for finite-state Markov decision processes, where the objective is to optimize both the expected mean-payoff performance of the system and its stability. We argue that the…

What are the functionals of the reward that can be computed and optimized exactly in Markov Decision Processes?In the finite-horizon, undiscounted setting, Dynamic Programming (DP) can only handle these operations efficiently for certain…

The most relevant problems in discounted reinforcement learning involve estimating the mean of a function under the stationary distribution of a Markov reward process, such as the expected return in policy evaluation, or the policy gradient…

Many control problems in environments that can be modeled as Markov decision processes (MDPs) concern infinite-time horizon specifications. The classical aim in this context is to compute a control policy that maximizes the probability of…

In the Markov decision process model, policies are usually evaluated by expected cumulative rewards. As this decision criterion is not always suitable, we propose in this paper an algorithm for computing a policy optimal for the quantile…