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Moving Target Defense (MTD) has emerged as a proactive and dynamic framework to counteract evolving cyber threats. Traditional MTD approaches often rely on assumptions about the attackers knowledge and behavior. However, real-world…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-08-20 Megha Bose , Praveen Paruchuri , Akshat Kumar

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has gained substantial attention across diverse application domains and theoretical investigations. Existing literature on RL theory largely focuses on risk-neutral settings where the decision-maker learns to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-24 Zhengqi Wu , Renyuan Xu

In this paper we consider the problem of how a reinforcement learning agent that is tasked with solving a sequence of reinforcement learning problems (a sequence of Markov decision processes) can use knowledge acquired early in its lifetime…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-05 Francisco M. Garcia , Philip S. Thomas

Bayesian approaches developed to solve the optimal design of sequential experiments are mathematically elegant but computationally challenging. Recently, techniques using amortization have been proposed to make these Bayesian approaches…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-20 Tom Blau , Edwin V. Bonilla , Iadine Chades , Amir Dezfouli

The Markov Decision Process (MDP) is a popular framework for sequential decision-making problems, and uncertainty quantification is an essential component of it to learn optimal decision-making strategies. In particular, a Bayesian…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-05-06 Jiaqi Guo , Chon Wai Ho , Sumeetpal S. Singh

Noisy sensing, imperfect control, and environment changes are defining characteristics of many real-world robot tasks. The partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) provides a principled mathematical framework for modeling and…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-09-22 Mikko Lauri , David Hsu , Joni Pajarinen

We study reward-free and reward-agnostic exploration in episodic finite-horizon Markov decision processes (MDPs), where an agent explores an unknown environment without observing external rewards. Reward-free exploration aims to enable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Oran Ridel , Alon Cohen

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-21 Kaito Ariu , Po-An Wang , Alexandre Proutiere , Kenshi Abe

We consider a class of optimization problems over stochastic variables where the algorithm can learn information about the value of any variable through a series of costly steps; we model this information acquisition process as a Markov…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2025-07-25 Shuchi Chawla , Dimitris Christou , Amit Harlev , Ziv Scully

We consider the reinforcement learning problem for the constrained Markov decision process (CMDP), which plays a central role in satisfying safety or resource constraints in sequential learning and decision-making. In this problem, we are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-19 Jiashuo Jiang , Yinyu Ye

We consider Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) where the rewards are unknown and may change in an adversarial manner. We provide an algorithm that achieves state-of-the-art regret bound of $O( \sqrt{\tau (\ln|S|+\ln|A|)T}\ln(T))$, where $S$…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-28 Adrian Rivera Cardoso , He Wang , Huan Xu

In this work we investigate an importance sampling approach for evaluating policies for a structurally time-varying factored Markov decision process (MDP), i.e. the policy's value is estimated with a high-probability confidence interval. In…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-02-07 Carmel Fiscko , Soummya Kar , Bruno Sinopoli

In classical Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), action costs and transition probabilities are assumed to be known, although an accurate estimation of these parameters is often not possible in practice. This study addresses MDPs under cost…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-06-24 Merve Merakli , Simge Kucukyavuz

We introduce Dynamic Contextual Markov Decision Processes (DCMDPs), a novel reinforcement learning framework for history-dependent environments that generalizes the contextual MDP framework to handle non-Markov environments, where contexts…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-19 Guy Tennenholtz , Nadav Merlis , Lior Shani , Martin Mladenov , Craig Boutilier

Online planning in Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) enables agents to make sequential decisions by simulating future trajectories from the current state, making it well-suited for large-scale or dynamic environments. Sample-based methods…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Tamir Shazman , Idan Lev-Yehudi , Ron Benchetit , Vadim Indelman

This paper studies optimal motion planning subject to motion and environment uncertainties. By modeling the system as a probabilistic labeled Markov decision process (PL-MDP), the control objective is to synthesize a finite-memory policy,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-01-03 Mingyu Cai , Shaoping Xiao , Zhijun Li , Zhen Kan

This paper studies the computation of robust deterministic policies for Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) in the Lightning Does Not Strike Twice (LDST) model of Mannor, Mebel and Xu (ICML '12). In this model, designed to provide robustness…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-12-18 Fei Wu , Erik Demeulemeester , Jannik Matuschke

A tenet of reinforcement learning is that the agent always observes rewards. However, this is not true in many realistic settings, e.g., a human observer may not always be available to provide rewards, sensors may be limited or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Alireza Kazemipour , Simone Parisi , Matthew E. Taylor , Michael Bowling

We study the problem of learning policies that maximize cumulative reward while satisfying safety constraints, even when the real environment differs from a simulator or nominal model. We focus on robust constrained Markov decision…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-12 Sourav Ganguly , Arnob Ghosh

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 (minimize…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2015-07-08 Mahmoud El Chamie , Behcet Acikmese