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Related papers: Incentive Design for Temporal Logic Objectives

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We consider the design of experiments to evaluate treatments that are administered by self-interested agents, each seeking to achieve the highest evaluation and win the experiment. For example, in an advertising experiment, a company wishes…

Methodology · Statistics 2015-09-18 Panos Toulis , David C. Parkes , Elery Pfeffer , James Zou

While most approaches to the problem of Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) focus on estimating a reward function that best explains an expert agent's policy or demonstrated behavior on a control task, it is often the case that such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-01 Dexter R. R. Scobee , S. Shankar Sastry

We study a principal-agent team production model. The principal hires a team of agents to participate in a common production task. The exact effort of each agent is unobservable and unverifiable, but the total production outcome (e.g. the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Shiliang Zuo

Markov decision processes (MDPs) are standard models for probabilistic systems with non-deterministic behaviours. Mean payoff (or long-run average reward) provides a mathematically elegant formalism to express performance related…

Performance · Computer Science 2017-09-08 Jan Křetínský , Tobias Meggendorfer

This paper considers an optimal task allocation problem for human robot collaboration in human robot systems with persistent tasks. Such human robot systems consist of human operators and intelligent robots collaborating with each other to…

Robotics · Computer Science 2017-06-02 Bo Wu , Bin Hu , Hai Lin

In reinforcement learning, the discount factor $\gamma$ controls the agent's effective planning horizon. Traditionally, this parameter was considered part of the MDP; however, as deep reinforcement learning algorithms tend to become…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-24 Chen Tessler , Shie Mannor

Constrained decision-making is essential for designing safe policies in real-world control systems, yet simulated environments often fail to capture real-world adversities. We consider the problem of learning a policy that will maximize the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Sourav Ganguly , Kishan Panaganti , Arnob Ghosh , Adam Wierman

Reward is the driving force for reinforcement-learning agents. This paper is dedicated to understanding the expressivity of reward as a way to capture tasks that we would want an agent to perform. We frame this study around three new…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-19 David Abel , Will Dabney , Anna Harutyunyan , Mark K. Ho , Michael L. Littman , Doina Precup , Satinder Singh

We consider a two-road dynamic routing game where the state of one of the roads (the "risky road") is stochastic and may change over time. This generates room for experimentation. A central planner may wish to induce some of the (finite…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2020-01-13 Emily Meigs , Francesca Parise , Asuman Ozdaglar , Daron Acemoglu

We consider the problem of finding the best memoryless stochastic policy for an infinite-horizon partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) with finite state and action spaces with respect to either the discounted or mean reward…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-05-02 Johannes Müller , Guido Montúfar

We investigate the problem of synthesizing optimal control policies for Markov decision processes (MDPs) with both qualitative and quantitative objectives. Specifically, our goal is to achieve a given linear temporal logic (LTL) task with…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-04-08 Yu Chen , Shaoyuan Li , Xiang Yin

In typical reinforcement learning (RL), the environment is assumed given and the goal of the learning is to identify an optimal policy for the agent taking actions through its interactions with the environment. In this paper, we extend this…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-10-25 Haifeng Zhang , Jun Wang , Zhiming Zhou , Weinan Zhang , Ying Wen , Yong Yu , Wenxin Li

Practical reinforcement learning problems are often formulated as constrained Markov decision process (CMDP) problems, in which the agent has to maximize the expected return while satisfying a set of prescribed safety constraints. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-23 Shin-ichi Maeda , Hayato Watahiki , Shintarou Okada , Masanori Koyama

In this work we investigate the inefficiency of the electricity system with strategic agents. Specifically, we prove that without a proper control the total demand of an inefficient system is at most twice the total demand of the optimal…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2015-09-10 Carlos Barreto , Eduardo Mojica-Nava , Nicanor Quijano

In dynamic programming and reinforcement learning, the policy for the sequential decision making of an agent in a stochastic environment is usually determined by expressing the goal as a scalar reward function and seeking a policy that…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-02-26 Simon Dima , Simon Fischer , Jobst Heitzig , Joss Oliver

Sequential allocation is a simple and widely studied mechanism to allocate indivisible items in turns to agents according to a pre-specified picking sequence of agents. At each turn, the current agent in the picking sequence picks its most…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2019-09-17 Mingyu Xiao , Jiaxing Ling

With the introduction of the graph-theoretic time-inconsistent planning model due to Kleinberg and Oren, it has been possible to investigate the computational complexity of how a task designer best can support a present-biased agent in…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2019-11-19 Fedor V. Fomin , Torstein J. F. Strømme

We present a reinforcement learning (RL) framework to synthesize a control policy from a given linear temporal logic (LTL) specification in an unknown stochastic environment that can be modeled as a Markov Decision Process (MDP).…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Alper Kamil Bozkurt , Yu Wang , Michael M. Zavlanos , Miroslav Pajic

We study how a principal can jointly shape an agent's timing and action through information. We develop a revelation principle: with intertemporal commitment, the problem simplifies to choosing a joint distribution over stopping times and…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-11-26 Andrew Koh , Sivakorn Sanguanmoo , Weijie Zhong

Long-term fairness is an important factor of consideration in designing and deploying learning-based decision systems in high-stake decision-making contexts. Recent work has proposed the use of Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) to formulate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-25 Eric Yang Yu , Zhizhen Qin , Min Kyung Lee , Sicun Gao