Related papers: Safe Exploration in Markov Decision Processes with…
Exploration is an essential part of reinforcement learning, which restricts the quality of learned policy. Hard-exploration environments are defined by huge state space and sparse rewards. In such conditions, an exhaustive exploration of…
Ensuring safety is a key aspect in sequential decision making problems, such as robotics or process control. The complexity of the underlying systems often makes finding the optimal decision challenging, especially when the safety-critical…
We introduce a framework for approximate analysis of Markov decision processes (MDP) with bounded-, unbounded-, and infinite-horizon properties. The main idea is to identify a "core" of an MDP, i.e., a subsystem where we provably remain…
This paper investigates the optimization problem of an infinite stage discrete time Markov decision process (MDP) with a long-run average metric considering both mean and variance of rewards together. Such performance metric is important…
This paper aims to put forward the concept that learning to take safe actions in unknown environments, even with probability one guarantees, can be achieved without the need for an unbounded number of exploratory trials, provided that one…
Partially-Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) are a well-known stochastic model for sequential decision making under limited information. We consider the EXPTIME-hard problem of synthesising policies that almost-surely reach some…
We consider primal-dual-based reinforcement learning (RL) in episodic constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs) with non-stationary objectives and constraints, which plays a central role in ensuring the safety of RL in time-varying…
The fixed-horizon constrained Markov Decision Process (C-MDP) is a well-known model for planning in stochastic environments under operating constraints. Chance-Constrained MDP (CC-MDP) is a variant that allows bounding the probability of…
Interval Markov Decision Processes (IMDPs) are finite-state uncertain Markov models, where the transition probabilities belong to intervals. Recently, there has been a surge of research on employing IMDPs as abstractions of stochastic…
We treat the problem of risk-aware control for stochastic shortest path (SSP) on Markov decision processes (MDP). Typically, expectation is considered for SSP, which however is oblivious to the incurred risk. We present an alternative view,…
Using a novel toy nautical navigation environment, we show that dynamic programming can be used when only incomplete information about a partially observed Markov decision process (POMDP) is known. By incorporating uncertainty into our…
The paper deals with finite-state Markov decision processes (MDPs) with integer weights assigned to each state-action pair. New algorithms are presented to classify end components according to their limiting behavior with respect to the…
During initial iterations of training in most Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms, agents perform a significant number of random exploratory steps. In the real world, this can limit the practicality of these algorithms as it can lead to…
Multi-agent Markov Decision Processes (MMDPs) arise in a variety of applications including target tracking, control of multi-robot swarms, and multiplayer games. A key challenge in MMDPs occurs when the state and action spaces grow…
Multi-objective optimization models that encode ordered sequential constraints provide a solution to model various challenging problems including encoding preferences, modeling a curriculum, and enforcing measures of safety. A recently…
Many processes, such as discrete event systems in engineering or population dynamics in biology, evolve in discrete space and continuous time. We consider the problem of optimal decision making in such discrete state and action space…
We consider the problem of learning an unknown Markov Decision Process (MDP) that is weakly communicating in the infinite horizon setting. We propose a Thompson Sampling-based reinforcement learning algorithm with dynamic episodes (TSDE).…
In this paper, we consider a continuous-time Markov decision process (CTMDP) in Borel spaces, where the certainty equivalent with respect to the exponential utility of the total undiscounted cost is to be minimized. The cost rate is…
We consider distribution-based objectives for Markov Decision Processes (MDP). This class of objectives gives rise to an interesting trade-off between full and partial information. As in full observation, the strategy in the MDP can depend…
In this paper we provide faster algorithms for approximately solving discounted Markov Decision Processes in multiple parameter regimes. Given a discounted Markov Decision Process (DMDP) with $|S|$ states, $|A|$ actions, discount factor…