Related papers: On State Variables, Bandit Problems and POMDPs
We cast episodic Markov decision process (MDP) planning as Bayesian inference over policies. A policy is treated as the latent variable and is assigned an unnormalized probability of optimality that is monotone in its expected return,…
In many practical sequential decision-making problems, tracking the state of the environment incurs a sensing/communication/computation cost. In these settings, the agent's interaction with its environment includes the additional component…
Partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) are a general framework for sequential decision-making under latent state uncertainty, yet learning in POMDPs is intractable in the worst case. Motivated by sensing and probing…
We study the offline data-driven sequential decision making problem in the framework of Markov decision process (MDP). In order to enhance the generalizability and adaptivity of the learned policy, we propose to evaluate each policy by a…
Autonomous agents often operate in scenarios where the state is partially observed. In addition to maximizing their cumulative reward, agents must execute complex tasks with rich temporal and logical structures. These tasks can be expressed…
Autonomous systems are often required to operate in partially observable environments. They must reliably execute a specified objective even with incomplete information about the state of the environment. We propose a methodology to…
We address the problem of approximate model minimization for MDPs in which the state is partitioned into endogenous and (much larger) exogenous components. An exogenous state variable is one whose dynamics are independent of the agent's…
We propose a new sequential decision-making setting, combining key aspects of two established online learning problems with bandit feedback. The optimal action to play at any given moment is contingent on an underlying changing state which…
Real-world sequential decision making problems commonly involve partial observability, which requires the agent to maintain a memory of history in order to infer the latent states, plan and make good decisions. Coping with partial…
Active classification, i.e., the sequential decision-making process aimed at data acquisition for classification purposes, arises naturally in many applications, including medical diagnosis, intrusion detection, and object tracking. In this…
Intelligent agents can cope with sensory-rich environments by learning task-agnostic state abstractions. In this paper, we propose an algorithm to approximate causal states, which are the coarsest partition of the joint history of actions…
Many medical decision-making tasks can be framed as partially observed Markov decision processes (POMDPs). However, prevailing two-stage approaches that first learn a POMDP and then solve it often fail because the model that best fits the…
This paper investigates MDPs with intermittent state information. We consider a scenario where the controller perceives the state information of the process via an unreliable communication channel. The transmissions of state information…
In this paper, we consider the problem of controlling a partially observed Markov decision process (POMDP) in order to actively estimate its state trajectory over a fixed horizon with minimal uncertainty. We pose a novel active smoothing…
Consider a multi-agent system in a dynamic and uncertain environment. Each agent's local decision problem is modeled as a Markov decision process (MDP) and agents must coordinate on a joint action in each period, which provides a reward to…
In supervised learning, we fit a single statistical model to a given data set, assuming that the data is associated with a singular task, which yields well-tuned models for specific use, but does not adapt well to new contexts. By contrast,…
Conventional imitation learning assumes access to the actions of demonstrators, but these motor signals are often non-observable in naturalistic settings. Additionally, sequential decision-making behaviors in these settings can deviate from…
A Tree Markov Decision Problem (T-MDP) is a finite-horizon MDP with a starting state $s_{1}$, in which every state is reachable from $s_{1}$ through exactly one state-action trajectory. T-MDPs arise naturally as abstractions of decision…
In this work, we study the problem of actively classifying the attributes of dynamical systems characterized as a finite set of Markov decision process (MDP) models. We are interested in finding strategies that actively interact with the…
Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) are stochastic optimization problems that model situations where a decision maker controls a system based on its state. Partially observed Markov decision processes (POMDPs) are generalizations of MDPs where…