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This study considers an optimal reinsurance, investment, and dividend strategy control problem for insurance companies in a regulated Markov regime-switching environment, intending to maximize long-run average reward. Unlike existing single…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-12-18 Lingjia Zeng , Manman Li

We consider Markov decision processes (MDPs) with multiple limit-average (or mean-payoff) objectives. There exist two different views: (i) the expectation semantics, where the goal is to optimize the expected mean-payoff objective, and (ii)…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2019-03-14 Krishnendu Chatterjee , Zuzana Křetínská , Jan Křetínský

We present the first finite-sample analysis of policy evaluation in robust average-reward Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). Prior work in this setting have established only asymptotic convergence guarantees, leaving open the question of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-12-11 Yang Xu , Washim Uddin Mondal , Vaneet Aggarwal

We study the reward-free reinforcement learning framework, which is particularly suitable for batch reinforcement learning and scenarios where one needs policies for multiple reward functions. This framework has two phases. In the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-26 Zihan Zhang , Simon S. Du , Xiangyang Ji

This paper describes a novel method to solve average-reward semi-Markov decision processes, by reducing them to a minimal sequence of cumulative reward problems. The usual solution methods for this type of problems update the gain (optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-04-21 Reinaldo Uribe Muriel , Fernando Lozando , Charles Anderson

Many robotic tasks are composed of a lot of temporally correlated sub-tasks in a highly complex environment. It is important to discover situational intentions and proper actions by deliberating on temporal abstractions to solve problems…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-26 Se-Wook Yoo , Seung-Woo Seo

We study a class of infinite-horizon average-cost Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) whose reward and transition structures are nearly separable. For the totally separable baseline (that is, with no perturbation), we derive an explicit…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-28 Dhairya Kantawala

The development of state-of-the-art systems in different applied areas of machine learning (ML) is driven by benchmarks, which have shaped the paradigm of evaluating generalisation capabilities from multiple perspectives. Although the…

Markov decision processes (MDPs) are standard models for probabilistic systems with non-deterministic behaviours. Long-run average rewards provide a mathematically elegant formalism for expressing long term performance. Value iteration (VI)…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2017-09-01 Pranav Ashok , Krishnendu Chatterjee , Przemyslaw Daca , Jan Křetínský , Tobias Meggendorfer

This paper deals with the unconstrained and constrained cases for continuous-time Markov decision processes under the finite-horizon expected total cost criterion. The state space is denumerable and the transition and cost rates are allowed…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2014-08-26 Qingda Wei , Xian Chen

A decision maker typically (i) incorporates training data to learn about the relative effectiveness of treatments, and (ii) chooses an implementation mechanism that implies an ``optimal'' predicted outcome distribution according to some…

Econometrics · Economics 2025-05-29 Anders Bredahl Kock , David Preinerstorfer

The aim of this paper is to study the reward based policy exploration problem in a supervised learning approach and enable robots to form complex movement trajectories in challenging reward settings and search spaces. For this, the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-11-10 M. Tuluhan Akbulut , Utku Bozdogan , Ahmet Tekden , Emre Ugur

We consider undiscounted reinforcement learning in Markov decision processes (MDPs) where both the reward functions and the state-transition probabilities may vary (gradually or abruptly) over time. For this problem setting, we propose an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-11 Pratik Gajane , Ronald Ortner , Peter Auer

We consider the problem of learning the optimal policy for Markov decision processes with safety constraints. We formulate the problem in a reach-avoid setup. Our goal is to design online reinforcement learning algorithms that ensure safety…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Abhijit Mazumdar , Rafal Wisniewski , Manuela L. Bujorianu

Modern treatment targeting methods often rely on estimating the conditional average treatment effect (CATE) using machine learning tools. While effective in identifying who benefits from treatment on the individual level, these approaches…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-11-05 Yuchen Hu , Shuangning Li , Stefan Wager

This paper studies the problem of data collection for policy evaluation in Markov decision processes (MDPs). In policy evaluation, we are given a target policy and asked to estimate the expected cumulative reward it will obtain in an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-22 Subhojyoti Mukherjee , Josiah P. Hanna , Robert Nowak

Machine Learning (ML) increasingly informs the allocation of opportunities to individuals and communities in areas such as lending, education, employment, and beyond. Such decisions often impact their subjects' future characteristics and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-03 David Lindner , Hoda Heidari , Andreas Krause

Markov decision processes (MDPs) are the defacto frame-work for sequential decision making in the presence ofstochastic uncertainty. A classical optimization criterion forMDPs is to maximize the expected discounted-sum pay-off, which…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-02-28 Tomas Brazdil , Krishnendu Chatterjee , Petr Novotny , Jiri Vahala

We introduce a class of learning problems where the agent is presented with a series of tasks. Intuitively, if there is relation among those tasks, then the information gained during execution of one task has value for the execution of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-09-06 Christos Dimitrakakis

In reinforcement learning (RL) , one of the key components is policy evaluation, which aims to estimate the value function (i.e., expected long-term accumulated reward) of a policy. With a good policy evaluation method, the RL algorithms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-25 Yue Wang , Wei Chen , Yuting Liu , Zhi-Ming Ma , Tie-Yan Liu