Related papers: Detection-averse optimal and receding-horizon cont…

Optimal control problems with a very large time horizon can be tackled with the Receding Horizon Control (RHC) method, which consists in solving a sequence of optimal control problems with small prediction horizon. The main result of this…

Canonical models of Markov decision processes (MDPs) usually consider geometric discounting based on a constant discount factor. While this standard modeling approach has led to many elegant results, some recent studies indicate the…

Many applications involve agents sharing a resource, such as networks or services. When agents are honest, the system functions well and there is a net profit. Unfortunately, some agents may be malicious, but it may be hard to detect them.…

Large-scale Markov decision processes (MDPs) require planning algorithms with runtime independent of the number of states of the MDP. We consider the planning problem in MDPs using linear value function approximation with only weak…

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…

Learning a Markov Decision Process (MDP) from a fixed batch of trajectories is a non-trivial task whose outcome's quality depends on both the amount and the diversity of the sampled regions of the state-action space. Yet, many MDPs are…

Local search metaheuristics like tabu search or simulated annealing are popular heuristic optimization algorithms for finding near-optimal solutions for combinatorial optimization problems. However, it is still challenging for researchers…

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…

Most applications in autonomous navigation using mounted cameras rely on the construction and processing of geometric 3D point clouds, which is an expensive process. However, there is another simpler way to make a space navigable quickly:…

We develop a generic policy gradient method with the global optimality guarantee for robust Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). While policy gradient methods are widely used for solving dynamic decision problems due to their scalable and…

We consider the sequential decision problem faced by the manager of an electric vehicle (EV) charging station, who aims to satisfy the charging demand of the customer while minimizing cost. Since the total time needed to charge the EV up to…

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 study reward-free reinforcement learning (RL) with linear function approximation, where the agent works in two phases: (1) in the exploration phase, the agent interacts with the environment but cannot access the reward; and (2) in the…

Control applications often feature tasks with similar, but not identical, dynamics. We introduce the Hidden Parameter Markov Decision Process (HiP-MDP), a framework that parametrizes a family of related dynamical systems with a…

We propose and analyze a temporal concatenation heuristic for solving large-scale finite-horizon Markov decision processes (MDP), which divides the MDP into smaller sub-problems along the time horizon and generates an overall solution by…

In this paper, we study the remote estimation problem of a Markov process over a channel with a cost. We formulate this problem as an infinite horizon optimization problem with two players, i.e., a sensor and a monitor, that have distinct…

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…

We consider partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) modeling an agent that needs a supply of a certain resource (e.g., electricity stored in batteries) to operate correctly. The resource is consumed by agent's actions and…

We study the problem of learning optimal policies in finite-horizon Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) using low-rank reinforcement learning (RL) methods. In finite-horizon MDPs, the policies, and therefore the value functions (VFs) are not…

Long-run average optimization problems for Markov decision processes (MDPs) require constructing policies with optimal steady-state behavior, i.e., optimal limit frequency of visits to the states. However, such policies may suffer from…