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Many control problems in environments that can be modeled as Markov decision processes (MDPs) concern infinite-time horizon specifications. The classical aim in this context is to compute a control policy that maximizes the probability of…
Models of many real-life applications, such as queuing models of communication networks or computing systems, have a countably infinite state-space. Algorithmic and learning procedures that have been developed to produce optimal policies…
We study computational and statistical aspects of learning Latent Markov Decision Processes (LMDPs). In this model, the learner interacts with an MDP drawn at the beginning of each epoch from an unknown mixture of MDPs. To sidestep known…
We introduce synchronizing objectives for Markov decision processes (MDP). Intuitively, a synchronizing objective requires that eventually, at every step there is a state which concentrates almost all the probability mass. In particular, it…
We consider a general method for the approximation of the distribution of a process conditioned to not hit a given set. Existing methods are based on particle system that are failable, in the sense that, in many situations , they are not…
Addressing uncertainty is critical for autonomous systems to robustly adapt to the real world. We formulate the problem of model uncertainty as a continuous Bayes-Adaptive Markov Decision Process (BAMDP), where an agent maintains a…
We propose a new abstract formalism for probabilistic timed systems, Parametric Interval Probabilistic Timed Automata, based on an extension of Parametric Timed Automata and Interval Markov Chains. In this context, we consider the…
Markov decision processes (MDPs) with large number of states are of high practical interest. However, conventional algorithms to solve MDP are computationally infeasible in this scenario. Approximate dynamic programming (ADP) methods tackle…
We introduce a mesh-type approach for tackling discrete-time, finite-horizon Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) characterized by state and action spaces that are general, encompassing both finite and infinite (yet suitably regular) subsets of…
Markov decision processes can be viewed as transformers of probability distributions. While this view is useful from a practical standpoint to reason about trajectories of distributions, basic reachability and safety problems are known to…
Fueled by advances in both robust optimization theory and reinforcement learning (RL), robust Markov Decision Processes (RMDPs) have garnered increasing attention due to their powerful capability for sequential decision-making under…
We consider finite-horizon Markov Decision Processes where parameters, such as transition probabilities, are unknown and estimated from data. The popular distributionally robust approach to addressing the parameter uncertainty can sometimes…
The window mean-payoff objective strengthens the classical mean-payoff objective by computing the mean-payoff over a finite window that slides along an infinite path. Two variants have been considered: in one variant, the maximum window…
In this paper, we study a mean-variance optimization problem in an infinite horizon discrete time discounted Markov decision process (MDP). The objective is to minimize the variance of system rewards with the constraint of mean performance.…
We prove new upper and lower bounds for sample complexity of finding an $\epsilon$-optimal policy of an infinite-horizon average-reward Markov decision process (MDP) given access to a generative model. When the mixing time of the…
We propose policy gradient algorithms for robust infinite-horizon Markov decision processes (MDPs) with non-rectangular uncertainty sets, thereby addressing an open challenge in the robust MDP literature. Indeed, uncertainty sets that…
We present new algorithms for computing and approximating bisimulation metrics in Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). Bisimulation metrics are an elegant formalism that capture behavioral equivalence between states and provide strong…
This paper focuses on optimizing probabilities of events of interest defined over general controlled discrete-time Markov processes. It is shown that the optimization over a wide class of $\omega$-regular properties can be reduced to the…
We study the problem of zero-delay coding for the transmission of a Markov source over a noisy channel with feedback and present a reinforcement learning solution which is guaranteed to achieve near-optimality. To this end, we formulate the…
We consider a robust approach to address uncertainty in model parameters in Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), which are widely used to model dynamic optimization in many applications. Most prior works consider the case where the uncertainty…