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We study infinite-horizon Discounted Markov Decision Processes (DMDPs) under a generative model. Motivated by the Algorithm with Advice framework Mitzenmacher and Vassilvitskii 2022, we propose a novel framework to investigate how a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-24 Lixing Lyu , Jiashuo Jiang , Wang Chi Cheung

We consider discounted infinite-horizon constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs), where the goal is to find an optimal policy that maximizes the expected cumulative reward while satisfying expected cumulative constraints. Motivated by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Tingting Ni , Maryam Kamgarpour

This paper shows that the optimal policy and value functions of a Markov Decision Process (MDP), either discounted or not, can be captured by a finite-horizon undiscounted Optimal Control Problem (OCP), even if based on an inexact model.…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-02-08 Arash Bahari Kordabad , Mario Zanon , Sebastien Gros

We introduce a framework for approximate analysis of Markov decision processes (MDP) with bounded-, unbounded-, and infinite-horizon properties. The main idea is to identify a "core" of an MDP, i.e., a subsystem where we provably remain…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-06-22 Jan Křetínský , Tobias Meggendorfer

It is well known that for any finite state Markov decision process (MDP) there is a memoryless deterministic policy that maximizes the expected reward. For partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs), optimal memoryless policies…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2016-02-16 Guido Montufar , Keyan Ghazi-Zahedi , Nihat Ay

State aggregation aims to reduce the computational complexity of solving Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) while preserving the performance of the original system. A fundamental challenge lies in optimizing policies within the aggregated, or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Shuo Zhao , Yongqiang Li , Yu Feng , Zhongsheng Hou , Yuanjing Feng

We consider the problem of planning with participation constraints introduced in [Zhang et al., 2022]. In this problem, a principal chooses actions in a Markov decision process, resulting in separate utilities for the principal and the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2022-05-17 Hanrui Zhang , Yu Cheng , Vincent Conitzer

We study the problem of deployment efficient reinforcement learning (RL) with linear function approximation under the \emph{reward-free} exploration setting. This is a well-motivated problem because deploying new policies is costly in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-23 Dan Qiao , Yu-Xiang Wang

We consider the problem of learning the optimal action-value function in the discounted-reward Markov decision processes (MDPs). We prove a new PAC bound on the sample-complexity of model-based value iteration algorithm in the presence of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-07-03 Mohammad Gheshlaghi Azar , Remi Munos , Bert Kappen

We propose and study a general framework for regularized Markov decision processes (MDPs) where the goal is to find an optimal policy that maximizes the expected discounted total reward plus a policy regularization term. The extant…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-10-22 Xiang Li , Wenhao Yang , Zhihua Zhang

This note provides upper bounds on the number of operations required to compute by value iterations a nearly optimal policy for an infinite-horizon discounted Markov decision process with a finite number of states and actions. For a given…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-01-29 Eugene A. Feinberg , Gaojin He

We consider the problem of learning in adversarial Markov decision processes [MDPs] with an oblivious adversary in a full-information setting. The agent interacts with an environment during $T$ episodes, each of which consists of $H$…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-06 Daniil Tiapkin , Evgenii Chzhen , Gilles Stoltz

We study reinforcement learning with function approximation for large-scale Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) where the state space and observation space are large or even continuous. Particularly, we consider Hilbert…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-27 Masatoshi Uehara , Ayush Sekhari , Jason D. Lee , Nathan Kallus , Wen Sun

We study query and computationally efficient planning algorithms with linear function approximation and a simulator. We assume that the agent only has local access to the simulator, meaning that the agent can only query the simulator at…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-08 Dong Yin , Botao Hao , Yasin Abbasi-Yadkori , Nevena Lazić , Csaba Szepesvári

This paper considers the problem of sensory data scheduling of multiple processes. There are $n$ independent linear time-invariant processes and a remote estimator monitoring all the processes. Each process is measured by a sensor, which…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2017-03-28 Shuang Wu , Xiaoqiang Ren , Subhrakanti Dey , Ling Shi

State-of-the-art efficient model-based Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms typically act by iteratively solving empirical models, i.e., by performing \emph{full-planning} on Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) built by the gathered…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-01 Yonathan Efroni , Nadav Merlis , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Shie Mannor

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims at learning an optimal strategy using a pre-collected dataset without further interactions with the environment. While various algorithms have been proposed for offline RL in the previous literature,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-02 Wei Xiong , Han Zhong , Chengshuai Shi , Cong Shen , Liwei Wang , Tong Zhang

The standard Markov Decision Process (MDP) formulation hinges on the assumption that an action is executed immediately after it was chosen. However, assuming it is often unrealistic and can lead to catastrophic failures in applications such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-14 Esther Derman , Gal Dalal , Shie Mannor

We present a framework to address a class of sequential decision making problems. Our framework features learning the optimal control policy with robustness to noisy data, determining the unknown state and action parameters, and performing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-20 Amber Srivastava , Srinivasa M Salapaka

A tenet of reinforcement learning is that the agent always observes rewards. However, this is not true in many realistic settings, e.g., a human observer may not always be available to provide rewards, sensors may be limited or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Alireza Kazemipour , Simone Parisi , Matthew E. Taylor , Michael Bowling