Related papers: Widest Paths and Global Propagation in Bounded Val…
For model checking stochastic games (SGs), bounded value iteration (BVI) algorithms have gained attention as efficient approximate methods with rigorous precision guarantees. However, BVI may not terminate or converge when the target SG…
Two standard models for probabilistic systems are Markov chains (MCs) and Markov decision processes (MDPs). Classic objectives for such probabilistic models for control and planning problems are reachability and stochastic shortest path.…
Simple stochastic games can be solved by value iteration (VI), which yields a sequence of under-approximations of the value of the game. This sequence is guaranteed to converge to the value only in the limit. Since no stopping criterion is…
Navigating a collision-free and optimal trajectory for a robot is a challenging task, particularly in environments with moving obstacles such as humans. We formulate this problem as a stochastic optimal control problem. Since solving the…
We consider concurrent stochastic games played on graphs with reachability and safety objectives. These games can be solved by value iteration as well as strategy iteration, each of them yielding a sequence of under-approximations of the…
While value iteration (VI) is a standard solution approach to simple stochastic games (SSGs), it suffered from the lack of a stopping criterion. Recently, several solutions have appeared, among them also "optimistic" VI (OVI). However, OVI…
Q-value iteration (Q-VI) is usually analyzed through the \(\gamma\)-contraction of the Bellman operator. This argument proves convergence to \(Q^*\), but it gives only a coarse account of when the induced greedy policy becomes optimal. We…
In this paper, we consider the stochastic iterative counterpart of the value iteration scheme wherein only noisy and possibly biased approximations of the Bellman operator are available. We call this counterpart as the approximate value…
Expectation propagation (EP) is a deterministic approximation algorithm that is often used to perform approximate Bayesian parameter learning. EP approximates the full intractable posterior distribution through a set of local approximations…
Variational inference (VI) provides fast approximations of a Bayesian posterior in part because it formulates posterior approximation as an optimization problem: to find the closest distribution to the exact posterior over some family of…
We consider stochastic dynamic programming problems with high-dimensional, discrete state-spaces and finite, discrete-time horizons that prohibit direct computation of the value function from a given Bellman equation for all states and time…
We consider two-player zero-sum concurrent stochastic games (CSGs) played on graphs with reachability and safety objectives. These include degenerate classes such as Markov decision processes or turn-based stochastic games, which can be…
Variational empirical Bayes (VEB) methods provide a practically attractive approach to fitting large, sparse, multiple regression models. These methods usually use coordinate ascent to optimize the variational objective function, an…
Most of the policy evaluation algorithms are based on the theories of Bellman Expectation and Optimality Equation, which derive two popular approaches - Policy Iteration (PI) and Value Iteration (VI). However, multi-step bootstrapping is…
We propose universal randomized function approximation-based empirical value iteration (EVI) algorithms for Markov decision processes. The `empirical' nature comes from each iteration being done empirically from samples available from…
Algorithmic analysis of Markov decision processes (MDP) and stochastic games (SG) in practice relies on value-iteration (VI) algorithms. Since the basic version of VI does not provide guarantees on the precision of the result, variants of…
Probabilistic graphs are an abstraction that allow us to study randomized propagation in graphs. In a probabilistic graph, each edge is "active" with a certain probability, independent of the other edges. For two vertices $u,v$, a classic…
Algorithmic analysis of Markov decision processes (MDP) and stochastic games (SG) in practice relies on value-iteration (VI) algorithms. Since basic VI does not provide guarantees on the precision of the result, variants of VI have been…
Bayesian regression games are a special class of two-player general-sum Bayesian games in which the learner is partially informed about the adversary's objective through a Bayesian prior. This formulation captures the uncertainty in regard…
Boosting variational inference (BVI) approximates an intractable probability density by iteratively building up a mixture of simple component distributions one at a time, using techniques from sparse convex optimization to provide both…