Related papers: Finding the Near Optimal Policy via Adaptive Reduc…
Software-intensive systems, such as software product lines and robotics, utilise Markov decision processes (MDPs) to capture uncertainty and analyse sequential decision-making problems. Despite the usefulness of conventional policy…
Modern policy optimization methods roughly follow the policy mirror descent (PMD) algorithmic template, for which there are by now numerous theoretical convergence results. However, most of these either target tabular environments, or can…
In this paper, we consider the finite-state approximation of a discrete-time constrained Markov decision process (MDP) under the discounted and average cost criteria. Using the linear programming formulation of the constrained discounted…
Natural policy gradient (NPG) methods are among the most widely used policy optimization algorithms in contemporary reinforcement learning. This class of methods is often applied in conjunction with entropy regularization -- an algorithmic…
Policy gradient methods are among the most effective methods in challenging reinforcement learning problems with large state and/or action spaces. However, little is known about even their most basic theoretical convergence properties,…
In most applications of model-based Markov decision processes, the parameters for the unknown underlying model are often estimated from the empirical data. Due to noise, the policy learnedfrom the estimated model is often far from the…
Robust Markov Decision Processes (RMDPs) are a widely used framework for sequential decision-making under parameter uncertainty. RMDPs have been extensively studied when the objective is to maximize the discounted return, but little is…
In this paper we consider the basic version of Reinforcement Learning (RL) that involves computing optimal data driven (adaptive) policies for Markovian decision process with unknown transition probabilities. We provide a brief survey of…
To overcome the curse of dimensionality and curse of modeling in Dynamic Programming (DP) methods for solving classical Markov Decision Process (MDP) problems, Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms are popular. In this paper, we consider…
In this paper, we propose a new lower approximation scheme for POMDP with discounted and average cost criterion. The approximating functions are determined by their values at a finite number of belief points, and can be computed efficiently…
In this paper, We propose a general Riemannian proximal optimization algorithm with guaranteed convergence to solve Markov decision process (MDP) problems. To model policy functions in MDP, we employ Gaussian mixture model (GMM) and…
We study an approach to policy selection for large relational Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). We consider a variant of approximate policy iteration (API) that replaces the usual value-function learning step with a learning step in policy…
One of the fundamental challenges for offline reinforcement learning (RL) is ensuring robustness to data distribution. Whether the data originates from a near-optimal policy or not, we anticipate that an algorithm should demonstrate its…
This work considers the sample complexity of obtaining an $\varepsilon$-optimal policy in an average reward Markov Decision Process (AMDP), given access to a generative model (simulator). When the ground-truth MDP is weakly communicating,…
Dynamic Programming (DP) provides standard algorithms to solve Markov Decision Processes. However, these algorithms generally do not optimize a scalar objective function. In this paper, we draw connections between DP and (constrained)…
This work considers the sample and computational complexity of obtaining an $\epsilon$-optimal policy in a discounted Markov Decision Process (MDP), given only access to a generative model. In this work, we study the effectiveness of the…
In robust Markov decision processes (MDPs), the uncertainty in the transition kernel is addressed by finding a policy that optimizes the worst-case performance over an uncertainty set of MDPs. While much of the literature has focused on…
Policy networks are a central feature of deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms for continuous control, enabling the estimation and sampling of high-value actions. From the variational inference perspective on RL, policy networks, when…
Long-term fairness is an important factor of consideration in designing and deploying learning-based decision systems in high-stake decision-making contexts. Recent work has proposed the use of Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) to formulate…
We propose a novel randomized linear programming algorithm for approximating the optimal policy of the discounted Markov decision problem. By leveraging the value-policy duality and binary-tree data structures, the algorithm adaptively…