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We consider fair resource allocation in sequential decision-making environments modeled as weakly coupled Markov decision processes, where resource constraints couple the action spaces of $N$ sub-Markov decision processes (sub-MDPs) that…
We study a finite time horizon Markov decision process (MDP) consisting of several groups of multi-action finite-state restless bandit processes, which are identical within each group. The bandit processes into different groups can be…
We consider the problem of controlling a fully specified Markov decision process (MDP), also known as the planning problem, when the state space is very large and calculating the optimal policy is intractable. Instead, we pursue the more…
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…
We introduce and study constrained Markov Decision Processes (cMDPs) with anytime constraints. An anytime constraint requires the agent to never violate its budget at any point in time, almost surely. Although Markovian policies are no…
Policy gradient methods are widely used in reinforcement learning. Yet, the nonconvexity of policy optimization poses significant challenges in understanding the global convergence of policy gradient methods. For a class of finite-horizon…
One of the most widely used methods for solving average cost MDP problems is the value iteration method. This method, however, is often computationally impractical and restricted in size of solvable MDP problems. We propose acceleration…
Fairness has emerged as an important concern in automated decision-making in recent years, especially when these decisions affect human welfare. In this work, we study fairness in temporally extended decision-making settings, specifically…
We consider the problem of minimizing a certainty equivalent of the total or discounted cost over a finite and an infinite time horizon which is generated by a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP). The certainty equivalent…
In adaptive systems, predictors are used to anticipate changes in the systems state or behavior that may require system adaption, e.g., changing its configuration or adjusting resource allocation. Therefore, the quality of predictors is…
Markov decision processes (MDPs) with rewards are a widespread and well-studied model for systems that make both probabilistic and nondeterministic choices. A fundamental result about MDPs is that their minimal and maximal expected rewards…
We study the problem of learning policy of an infinite-horizon, discounted cost, Markov decision process (MDP) with a large number of states. We compute the actions of a policy that is nearly as good as a policy chosen by a suitable oracle…
We consider a dynamic programming (DP) approach to approximately solving an infinite-horizon constrained Markov decision process (CMDP) problem with a fixed initial-state for the expected total discounted-reward criterion with a…
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…
We investigate the use of temporally abstract actions, or macro-actions, in the solution of Markov decision processes. Unlike current models that combine both primitive actions and macro-actions and leave the state space unchanged, we…
The problem of constrained Markov decision process (CMDP) is investigated, where an agent aims to maximize the expected accumulated discounted reward subject to multiple constraints on its utilities/costs. A new primal-dual approach is…
We consider a finite-state partially observable Markov decision problem (POMDP) with an infinite horizon and a discounted cost, and we propose a new method for computing a cost function approximation that is based on features and…
This paper proposes a new formulation for the dynamic resource allocation problem, which converts the traditional MDP model with known parameters and no capacity constraints to a new model with uncertain parameters and a resource capacity…
In this paper, we consider the gradual-impulse control problem of continuous-time Markov decision processes, where the system performance is measured by the expectation of the exponential utility of the total cost. We prove, under very…
We consider a piecewise deterministic Markov decision process, where the expected exponential utility of total (nonnegative) cost is to be minimized. The cost rate, transition rate and post-jump distributions are under control. The state…