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We study the $(\varepsilon, \delta)$-PAC policy identification problem in finite-horizon episodic Markov Decision Processes. Existing approaches provide finite-time guarantees for approximate settings ($\varepsilon>0$) but suffer from high…
We consider killed Markov decision processes for countable models on a finite time-interval. Existence of a uniform $\varepsilon$-optimal policy is proven. We show the correctness of the fundamental equation. The optimal control problem is…
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 investigate reinforcement learning in the setting of Markov decision processes for a large number of exchangeable agents interacting in a mean field manner. Applications include, for example, the control of a large number of robots…
In most common settings of Markov Decision Process (MDP), an agent evaluate a policy based on expectation of (discounted) sum of rewards. However in many applications this criterion might not be suitable from two perspective: first, in risk…
We consider strongly-convex-strongly-concave saddle-point problems with general non-bilinear objective and different condition numbers with respect to the primal and the dual variables. First, we consider such problems with smooth composite…
We extend the Frank-Wolfe (FW) optimization algorithm to solve constrained smooth convex-concave saddle point (SP) problems. Remarkably, the method only requires access to linear minimization oracles. Leveraging recent advances in FW…
Robust Markov decision processes (RMDPs) extend standard Markov decision processes (MDPs) to account for uncertainty in the transition probabilities. RMDPs have an uncertainty set that defines a set of possible transition functions, each of…
This paper considers continuous-time coordination algorithms for networks of agents that seek to collectively solve a general class of nonsmooth convex optimization problems with an inherent distributed structure. Our algorithm design…
In a discounted reward Markov Decision Process (MDP), the objective is to find the optimal value function, i.e., the value function corresponding to an optimal policy. This problem reduces to solving a functional equation known as the…
This paper proposes a multi-scale method to design a continuous-time distributed algorithm for constrained convex optimization problems by using multi-agents with Markov switched network dynamics and noisy inter-agent communications. Unlike…
We propose a vector linear programming formulation for a non-stationary, finite-horizon Markov decision process with vector-valued rewards. Pareto efficient policies are shown to correspond to efficient solutions of the linear program, and…
It is well known that for any finite state Markov decision process (MDP) there is a memoryless deterministic policy that maximizes the expected reward. For partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs), optimal memoryless policies…
In this paper, we study the learning of safe policies in the setting of reinforcement learning problems. This is, we aim to control a Markov Decision Process (MDP) of which we do not know the transition probabilities, but we have access 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…
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…
In this invited contribution, we revisit the stochastic shortest path problem, and show how recent results allow one to improve over the classical solutions: we present algorithms to synthesize strategies with multiple guarantees on the…
The Markov decision process (MDP) formulation used to model many real-world sequential decision making problems does not efficiently capture the setting where the set of available decisions (actions) at each time step is stochastic.…
The online Markov decision process (MDP) is a generalization of the classical Markov decision process that incorporates changing reward functions. In this paper, we propose practical online MDP algorithms with policy iteration and…
Constraint handling plays a key role in solving realistic complex optimization problems. Though intensively discussed in the last few decades, existing constraint handling techniques predominantly rely on human experts' designs, which more…