Related papers: Transience in Countable MDPs
Controllable Markov chains describe the dynamics of sequential decision making tasks and are the central component in optimal control and reinforcement learning. In this work, we give the general form of an optimal policy for learning…
This paper is devoted to solving a time-inconsistent risk-sensitive control problem with parameter $\e$ and its limit case ($\e\rightarrow0^+$) for countable-stated Markov decision processes (MDPs for short). Since the cost functional is…
A Tree Markov Decision Problem (T-MDP) is a finite-horizon MDP with a starting state $s_{1}$, in which every state is reachable from $s_{1}$ through exactly one state-action trajectory. T-MDPs arise naturally as abstractions of decision…
Markov decision processes (MDPs) are formal models commonly used in sequential decision-making. MDPs capture the stochasticity that may arise, for instance, from imprecise actuators via probabilities in the transition function. However, in…
Stochastic and soft optimal policies resulting from entropy-regularized Markov decision processes (ER-MDP) are desirable for exploration and imitation learning applications. Motivated by the fact that such policies are sensitive with…
We consider infinite-state Markov decision processes (MDPs) that are induced by extensions of vector addition systems with states (VASS). Verification conditions for these MDPs are described by reachability and Buchi objectives w.r.t. given…
Markov decision process over vector addition system with states (VASS MDP) is a finite state model combining non-deterministic and probabilistic behavior, augmented with non-negative integer counters that can be incremented or decremented…
We analyze the properties of degree-preserving Markov chains based on elementary edge switchings in undirected and directed graphs. We give exact yet simple formulas for the mobility of a graph (the number of possible moves) in terms of its…
The most probable transition path in a one-dimensional overdamped system is rigorously proved to possess less than two turning points. The proof is valid for any potentials, transition times, initial and final transition points.
Decision-making problems in uncertain or stochastic domains are often formulated as Markov decision processes (MDPs). Policy iteration (PI) is a popular algorithm for searching over policy-space, the size of which is exponential in the…
Markov automata combine non-determinism, probabilistic branching, and exponentially distributed delays. This compositional variant of continuous-time Markov decision processes is used in reliability engineering, performance evaluation and…
This paper investigates MDPs with intermittent state information. We consider a scenario where the controller perceives the state information of the process via an unreliable communication channel. The transmissions of state information…
Although average gain optimality is a commonly adopted performance measure in Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), it is often too asymptotic. Further incorporating measures of immediate losses leads to the hierarchy of bias optimalities, all…
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)…
The formal verification and controller synthesis for Markov decision processes that evolve over uncountable state spaces are computationally hard and thus generally rely on the use of approximations. In this work, we consider the…
Sufficient conditions are identified under which the value function and the optimal strategy of a Markov decision process (MDP) are even and quasi-convex in the state. The key idea behind these conditions is the following. First, sufficient…
In this work, we consider an online robust Markov Decision Process (MDP) where we have the information of finitely many prototypes of the underlying transition kernel. We consider an adaptively updated ambiguity set of the prototypes and…
This paper establishes that an MDP with a unique optimal policy and ergodic associated transition matrix ensures the convergence of various versions of the Value Iteration algorithm at a geometric rate that exceeds the discount factor…
Reachability problems in infinite-state systems are often subject to extremely high complexity. This motivates the investigation of efficient overapproximations, where we add transitions to obtain a system in which reachability can be…
We study time-bounded reachability in continuous-time Markov decision processes for time-abstract scheduler classes. Such reachability problems play a paramount role in dependability analysis and the modelling of manufacturing and queueing…