Related papers: Verification of indefinite-horizon POMDPs
Probabilistic hyperproperties describe probabilistic relations between multiple sets of executions in a stochastic system. Prominent examples include information-theoretic characterizations of security and privacy policies. However, model…
Empirical investigations into unintended model behavior often show that the algorithm is predicting another outcome than what was intended. These exposes highlight the need to identify when algorithms predict unintended quantities - ideally…
Design and control of autonomous systems that operate in uncertain or adversarial environments can be facilitated by formal modelling and analysis. Probabilistic model checking is a technique to automatically verify, for a given temporal…
Planning under partial obervability is essential for autonomous robots. A principled way to address such planning problems is the Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP). Although solving POMDPs is computationally intractable,…
Off-policy policy estimators that use importance sampling (IS) can suffer from high variance in long-horizon domains, and there has been particular excitement over new IS methods that leverage the structure of Markov decision processes. We…
The partial monitoring (PM) framework provides a theoretical formulation of sequential learning problems with incomplete feedback. On each round, a learning agent plays an action while the environment simultaneously chooses an outcome. The…
We show that for several variations of partially observable Markov decision processes, polynomial-time algorithms for finding control policies are unlikely to or simply don't have guarantees of finding policies within a constant factor or a…
Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) are rich environments often used in machine learning. But the issue of information and causal structures in POMDPs has been relatively little studied. This paper presents the concepts…
We present a new proof rule for verifying lower bounds on quantities of probabilistic programs. Our proof rule is not confined to almost-surely terminating programs -- as is the case for existing rules -- and can be used to establish…
Partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) are a fundamental model for sequential decision-making under uncertainty. However, many verification and synthesis problems for POMDPs are undecidable or intractable. Most prominently,…
This paper studies discrete-time average-cost infinite-horizon Markov decision processes (MDPs) with Borel state and action sets. It introduces new sufficient conditions for { the} validity of optimality inequalities and optimality…
Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) approaches have shown successful results in solving a large variety of complex, structured, long-horizon problems. Nevertheless, a full theoretical understanding of this empirical evidence is…
Automated synthesis of correct-by-construction controllers for autonomous systems is crucial for their deployment in safety-critical scenarios. Such autonomous systems are naturally modeled as stochastic dynamical models. The general…
We study the detection problem for a finite set of Markov decision processes (MDPs) where the MDPs have the same state and action spaces but possibly different probabilistic transition functions. Any one of these MDPs could be the model for…
We address the multiple testing problem under the assumption that the true/false hypotheses are driven by a Hidden Markov Model (HMM), which is recognized as a fundamental setting to model multiple testing under dependence since the seminal…
We study strategy synthesis for partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs). The particular problem is to determine strategies that provably adhere to (probabilistic) temporal logic constraints. This problem is computationally…
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…
Policy gradient methods are widely used in reinforcement learning. Yet, the nonconvexity of policy optimization poses significant challenges in understanding the global convergence of policy gradient methods. For a class of finite-horizon…
Obviously strategyproof (OSP) mechanisms maintain the incentive compatibility of agents that are not fully rational. They have been object of a number of studies since their recent definition. A research agenda, initiated in…
Robots often face challenges in domestic environments where visual feedback is ineffective, such as retrieving objects obstructed by occlusions or finding a light switch in the dark. In these cases, utilizing contacts to localize the target…