Related papers: On Markov Decision Processes with Borel Spaces and…
Value iteration is a well-known method of solving Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) that is simple to implement and boasts strong theoretical convergence guarantees. However, the computational cost of value iteration quickly becomes…
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…
In many practical sequential decision-making problems, tracking the state of the environment incurs a sensing/communication/computation cost. In these settings, the agent's interaction with its environment includes the additional component…
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…
Models of many real-life applications, such as queuing models of communication networks or computing systems, have a countably infinite state-space. Algorithmic and learning procedures that have been developed to produce optimal policies…
In this paper, we consider the discounted continuous-time Markov decision process (CTMDP) with a lower bounding function. In this model, the negative part of each cost rate is bounded by the drift function, say $w$, whereas the positive…
We study a class of infinite-horizon average-cost Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) whose reward and transition structures are nearly separable. For the totally separable baseline (that is, with no perturbation), we derive an explicit…
This paper deals with the unconstrained and constrained cases for continuous-time Markov decision processes under the finite-horizon expected total cost criterion. The state space is denumerable and the transition and cost rates are allowed…
We study upper and lower bounds on the sample-complexity of learning near-optimal behaviour in finite-state discounted Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). For the upper bound we make the assumption that each action leads to at most two…
This paper concerns computation of optimal policies in which the one-step reward function contains a cost term that models Kullback-Leibler divergence with respect to nominal dynamics. This technique was introduced by Todorov in 2007, where…
Economic Model Predictive Control (MPC) dissipativity theory is central to discussing the stability of policies resulting from minimizing economic stage costs. In its current form, the dissipativity theory for economic MPC applies to…
This paper is devoted to studying the average optimality in continuous-time Markov decision processes with fairly general state and action spaces. The criterion to be maximized is expected average rewards. The transition rates of underlying…
This paper extends to Continuous-Time Jump Markov Decision Processes (CTJMDP) the classic result for Markov Decision Processes stating that, for a given initial state distribution, for every policy there is a (randomized) Markov policy,…
This paper discusses the functional stability of closed-loop Markov Chains under optimal policies resulting from a discounted optimality criterion, forming Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). We investigate the stability of MDPs in the sense…
This paper discusses algorithms for solving Markov decision processes (MDPs) that have monotone optimal policies. We propose a two-stage alternating convex optimization scheme that can accelerate the search for an optimal policy by…
We consider Markov decision processes (MDPs) with multiple limit-average (or mean-payoff) objectives. There exist two different views: (i) the expectation semantics, where the goal is to optimize the expected mean-payoff objective, and (ii)…
Algorithmic decisions made by machine learning models in high-stakes domains may have lasting impacts over time. However, naive applications of standard fairness criterion in static settings over temporal domains may lead to delayed and…
We consider the problem of maximizing the expected average reward obtained over an infinite time horizon by $n$ weakly coupled Markov decision processes. Our setup is a substantial generalization of the multi-armed restless bandit problem…
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…
Markov decision processes (MDPs) are a canonical model to reason about decision making within a stochastic environment. We study a fundamental class of infinite MDPs: one-counter MDPs (OC-MDPs). They extend finite MDPs via an associated…