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Developing feature selection algorithms that move beyond a pure correlational to a more causal analysis of observational data is an important problem in the sciences. Several algorithms attempt to do so by discovering the Markov blanket of…
We introduce a class of models for multidimensional control problems which we call skip-free Markov decision processes on trees. We describe and analyse an algorithm applicable to Markov decision processes of this type that are skip-free in…
Software-intensive systems, such as software product lines and robotics, utilise Markov decision processes (MDPs) to capture uncertainty and analyse sequential decision-making problems. Despite the usefulness of conventional policy…
We study the evaluation of a policy under best- and worst-case perturbations to a Markov decision process (MDP), using transition observations from the original MDP, whether they are generated under the same or a different policy. This is…
A nonparametric approach for policy learning for POMDPs is proposed. The approach represents distributions over the states, observations, and actions as embeddings in feature spaces, which are reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces.…
This paper investigates a class of optimal control problems associated with Markov processes with local state information. The decision-maker has only local access to a subset of a state vector information as often encountered in…
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…
We consider challenging dynamic programming models where the associated Bellman equation, and the value and policy iteration algorithms commonly exhibit complex and even pathological behavior. Our analysis is based on the new notion of…
We present a method for a certain class of Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) that can relate the optimal policy back to one or more reward sources in the environment. For a given initial state, without fully computing the value function,…
Robust Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) are a powerful framework for modeling sequential decision-making problems with model uncertainty. This paper proposes the first first-order framework for solving robust MDPs. Our algorithm interleaves…
We propose a novel randomized linear programming algorithm for approximating the optimal policy of the discounted Markov decision problem. By leveraging the value-policy duality and binary-tree data structures, the algorithm adaptively…
We propose an algorithm for deterministic continuous Markov Decision Processes with sparse rewards that computes the optimal policy exactly with no dependency on the size of the state space. The algorithm has time complexity of $O( |R|^3…
Here, we explore the problem of error propagation mitigation in modular digital twins as a sequential decision process. Building on a companion study that used a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) to infer latent error regimes from surrogate-physics…
We introduce a new approximate solution technique for first-order Markov decision processes (FOMDPs). Representing the value function linearly w.r.t. a set of first-order basis functions, we compute suitable weights by casting the…
A new mechanism for efficiently solving the Markov decision processes (MDPs) is proposed in this paper. We introduce the notion of reachability landscape where we use the Mean First Passage Time (MFPT) as a means to characterize the…
We consider average-cost Markov decision processes (MDPs) with Borel state spaces, countable, discrete action spaces, and strictly unbounded one-stage costs. For the minimum pair approach, we introduce a new majorization condition on the…
We propose a formulation of the stochastic cutting stock problem as a discounted infinite-horizon Markov decision process. At each decision epoch, given current inventory of items, an agent chooses in which patterns to cut objects in stock…
Recent control algorithms for Markov decision processes (MDPs) have been designed using an implicit analogy with well-established optimization algorithms. In this paper, we adopt the quasi-Newton method (QNM) from convex optimization to…
Discrete time stochastic optimal control problems and Markov decision processes (MDPs), respectively, serve as fundamental models for problems that involve sequential decision making under uncertainty and as such constitute the theoretical…
Chance Constrained Markov Decision Processes maximize reward subject to a bounded probability of failure, and have been frequently applied for planning with potentially dangerous outcomes or unknown environments. Solution algorithms have…