Related papers: Risk-Averse Stochastic Shortest Path Planning

In this paper, we consider planning in stochastic shortest path (SSP) problems, a subclass of Markov Decision Problems (MDP). We focus on medium-size problems whose state space can be fully enumerated. This problem has numerous important…

We consider a broad class of dynamic programming (DP) problems that involve a partially linear structure and some positivity properties in their system equation and cost function. We address deterministic and stochastic problems, possibly…

Over the past few years, ride-sharing has emerged as an effective way to relieve traffic congestion. A key problem for these platforms is to come up with a revenue-optimal (or GMV-optimal) pricing scheme and an induced vehicle dispatching…

Keeping risk under control is often more crucial than maximizing expected rewards in real-world decision-making situations, such as finance, robotics, autonomous driving, etc. The most natural choice of risk measures is variance, which…

Value-at-risk (VaR), also known as quantile, is a crucial risk measure in finance and other fields. However, optimizing VaR metrics in Markov decision processes (MDPs) is challenging because VaR is non-additive and the traditional dynamic…

In this paper, we tackle the problem of risk-averse route planning in a transportation network with time-dependent and stochastic costs. To solve this problem, we propose an adaptation of the A* algorithm that accommodates any risk measure…

Multi-robot navigation and path planning in continuous state and action spaces with uncertain environments remains an open challenge. Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) is one of the most popular paradigms for solving this task, but its…

Many robotics domains use some form of nonconvex model predictive control (MPC) for planning, which sets a reduced time horizon, performs trajectory optimization, and replans at every step. The actual task typically requires a much longer…

Many applications -- including power systems, robotics, and economics -- involve a dynamical system interacting with a stochastic and hard-to-model environment. We adopt a reinforcement learning approach to control such systems.…

We study a large-scale patrol problem with state-dependent costs and multi-agent coordination.We consider heterogeneous agents, rather general reward functions, and the capabilities of tracking agents' trajectories.Given the complexity and…

We propose a diffusion approximation method to the continuous-state Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) that can be utilized to address autonomous navigation and control in unstructured off-road environments. In contrast to most…

This paper is concerned with a data-driven technique for constructing finite Markov decision processes (MDPs) as finite abstractions of discrete-time stochastic control systems with unknown dynamics while providing formal closeness…

Sailboat path-planning is a natural hybrid control problem (due to continuous steering and occasional "tack-switching" maneuvers), with the actual path-to-target greatly affected by stochastically evolving wind conditions. Previous studies…

This paper studies the approximation of optimal control policies by quantized (discretized) policies for a very general class of Markov decision processes (MDPs). The problem is motivated by applications in networked control systems,…

It remains challenging to deploy existing risk-averse approaches to real-world applications. The reasons are multi-fold, including the lack of global optimality guarantee and the necessity of learning from long-term consecutive…

We study the convergence of an $N$-particle Markovian controlled system to the solution of a family of stochastic McKean-Vlasov control problems, either with a finite horizon or Schr\"odinger type cost functional. Specifically, under…

Risk-averse multistage stochastic programs appear in multiple areas and are challenging to solve. Stochastic Dual Dynamic Programming (SDDP) is a well-known tool to address such problems under time-independence assumptions. We show how to…

Solving general Markov decision processes (MDPs) is a computationally hard problem. Solving finite-horizon MDPs, on the other hand, is highly tractable with well known polynomial-time algorithms. What drives this extreme disparity, and do…

In classical Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), action costs and transition probabilities are assumed to be known, although an accurate estimation of these parameters is often not possible in practice. This study addresses MDPs under cost…

We consider large-scale Markov decision processes (MDPs) with an unknown cost function and employ stochastic convex optimization tools to address the problem of imitation learning, which consists of learning a policy from a finite set of…