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Markov decision processes are useful models of concurrency optimisation problems, but are often intractable for exhaustive verification methods. Recent work has introduced lightweight approximative techniques that sample directly from…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2015-03-24 Axel Legay , Sean Sedwards , Louis-Marie Traonouez

The objective of this work is to study continuous-time Markov decision processes on a general Borel state space with both impulsive and continuous controls for the infinite-time horizon discounted cost. The continuous-time controlled…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-08-17 François Dufour , Alexei Piunovskiy

We propose a new approach to solving dynamic decision problems with rewards that are unbounded below. The approach involves transforming the Bellman equation in order to convert an unbounded problem into a bounded one. The major advantage…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2019-12-02 Qingyin Ma , John Stachurski

This paper studies Markov Decision Processes under parameter uncertainty. We adapt the distributionally robust optimization framework, and assume that the uncertain parameters are random variables following an unknown distribution, and…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2015-05-14 Pengqian Yu , Huan Xu

This paper studies discrete-time average-cost infinite-horizon Markov decision processes (MDPs) with Borel state and action sets. It introduces new sufficient conditions for { the} validity of optimality inequalities and optimality…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-01-28 Eugene A. Feinberg , Pavlo O. Kasyanov , Liliia S. Paliichuk

We study the expected accumulated reward for a discrete-time Markov reward model with absorbing states. The rewards are impulse rewards, where a reward $\rho_{ij}$ is accumulated when transitioning from state $i$ to state $j$. We derive an…

Probability · Mathematics 2021-05-04 Louis Tan , Kaveh Mahdaviani , Ashish Khisti

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-06-29 Manfred Jaeger , Giorgio Bacci , Giovanni Bacci , Kim Guldstrand Larsen , Peter Gjøl Jensen

Safe reinforcement learning has been a promising approach for optimizing the policy of an agent that operates in safety-critical applications. In this paper, we propose an algorithm, SNO-MDP, that explores and optimizes Markov decision…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-18 Akifumi Wachi , Yanan Sui

This paper studies continuous-time Markov decision processes under the risk-sensitive average cost criterion. The state space is a finite set, the action space is a Borel space, the cost and transition rates are bounded, and the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2015-12-22 Qingda Wei , Xian Chen

The paper provides an overview of the theory and applications of risk-sensitive Markov decision processes. The term 'risk-sensitive' refers here to the use of the Optimized Certainty Equivalent as a means to measure expectation and risk.…

Risk Management · Quantitative Finance 2025-09-23 Nicole Bäuerle , Anna Jaśkiewicz

This paper describes sufficient conditions for the existence of optimal policies for Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) with Borel state, observation, and action sets and with the expected total costs. Action sets may…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2014-07-02 Eugene A. Feinberg , Pavlo O. Kasyanov , Michael Z. Zgurovsky

Inverse reinforcement learning attempts to reconstruct the reward function in a Markov decision problem, using observations of agent actions. As already observed in Russell [1998] the problem is ill-posed, and the reward function is not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-09 Haoyang Cao , Samuel N. Cohen , Lukasz Szpruch

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-02 Yue Wang , Alvaro Velasquez , George Atia , Ashley Prater-Bennette , Shaofeng Zou

We consider reinforcement learning in changing Markov Decision Processes where both the state-transition probabilities and the reward functions may vary over time. For this problem setting, we propose an algorithm using a sliding window…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-05-28 Pratik Gajane , Ronald Ortner , Peter Auer

In this work, we investigate the optimal control problem for continuous-time Markov decision processes with the random impact of the environment. We provide conditions to show the existence of optimal controls under finite-horizon criteria.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-06-23 Jinghai Shao , Kun Zhao

We are interested in risk constraints for infinite horizon discrete time Markov decision processes (MDPs). Starting with average reward MDPs, we show that increasing concave stochastic dominance constraints on the empirical distribution of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2012-06-21 William B. Haskell , Rahul Jain

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…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2020-02-26 Murat Cubuktepe , Nils Jansen , Sebastian Junges , Joost-Pieter Katoen , Ufuk Topcu

We study infinite-horizon Markov decision processes (MDPs) where the decision maker evaluates each of her strategies by aggregating the infinite stream of expected stage-rewards. The crucial feature of our approach is that the aggregation…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-05 János Flesch , Arkadi Predtetchinski , William D Sudderth , Xavier Venel

We consider the problem of learning to behave optimally in a Markov Decision Process when a reward function is not specified, but instead we have access to a set of demonstrators of varying performance. We assume the demonstrators are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-01 Pablo Samuel Castro , Shijian Li , Daqing Zhang

This paper, based on the compactness-continuity and finite value conditions, establishes the sufficiency of the class of stationary policies out of the general class of history-dependent ones for a constrained continuous-time Markov…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2014-10-31 Yi Zhang