Related papers: Maximum Expected Hitting Cost of a Markov Decision…
Markov decision processes (MDPs) are widely used in modeling decision making problems in stochastic environments. However, precise specification of the reward functions in MDPs is often very difficult. Recent approaches have focused on…
We study countably infinite Markov decision processes (MDPs) with real-valued transition rewards. Every infinite run induces the following sequences of payoffs: 1. Point payoff (the sequence of directly seen transition rewards), 2. Total…
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…
We study Markov decision processes (MDPs) with a countably infinite number of states. The $\limsup$ (resp. $\liminf$) threshold objective is to maximize the probability that the $\limsup$ (resp. $\liminf$) of the infinite sequence of…
We study countably infinite Markov decision processes (MDPs) with real-valued transition rewards. Every infinite run induces the following sequences of payoffs: 1. Point payoff (the sequence of directly seen transition rewards), 2. Mean…
Markov decision process (MDP) is a decision making framework where a decision maker is interested in maximizing the expected discounted value of a stream of rewards received at future stages at various states which are visited according to…
Computing optimal conditional reachability probabilities in Markov decision processes (MDPs) is tractable by a reduction to reachability probabilities. Yet, this reduction yields cyclic, challenging MDPs that are often notoriously hard to…
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…
We consider the problem of constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP) where an agent interacts with a unichain Markov Decision Process. At every interaction, the agent obtains a reward. Further, there are $K$ cost functions. The agent aims…
In this paper, we study a mean-variance optimization problem in an infinite horizon discrete time discounted Markov decision process (MDP). The objective is to minimize the variance of system rewards with the constraint of mean performance.…
Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) are powerful models for sequential decision making under transition and observation uncertainties. This paper studies the challenging yet important problem in POMDPs known as the…
This paper proposes a computationally tractable algorithm for learning infinite-horizon average-reward linear Markov decision processes (MDPs) and linear mixture MDPs under the Bellman optimality condition. While guaranteeing computational…
We show subexponential lower bounds (i.e., $2^{\Omega (n^c)}$) on the smoothed complexity of the classical Howard's Policy Iteration algorithm for Markov Decision Processes. The bounds hold for the total reward and the average reward…
We are interested in risk constraints for infinite horizon discrete time Markov decision processes (MDPs). Starting with average reward MDPs, we show that increasing concave stochastic dominance constraints on the empirical distribution of…
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 addresses objectives tailored to the risk-averse optimization of accumulated rewards in Markov decision processes (MDPs). The studied objectives require maximizing the expected value of the accumulated rewards minus a penalty…
Deterministic Markov Decision Processes (DMDPs) are a mathematical framework for decision-making where the outcomes and future possible actions are deterministically determined by the current action taken. DMDPs can be viewed as a finite…
We consider partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) with a set of target states and every transition is associated with an integer cost. The optimization objective we study asks to minimize the expected total cost till the…
In this work, we study discrete-time Markov decision processes (MDPs) under constraints with Borel state and action spaces and where all the performance functions have the same form of the expected total reward (ETR) criterion over the…
We present a general framework for applying machine-learning algorithms to the verification of Markov decision processes (MDPs). The primary goal of these techniques is to improve performance by avoiding an exhaustive exploration of the…