Related papers: An Adaptive State Aggregation Algorithm for Markov…
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…
Algorithmic analysis of Markov decision processes (MDP) and stochastic games (SG) in practice relies on value-iteration (VI) algorithms. Since basic VI does not provide guarantees on the precision of the result, variants of VI have been…
In Markov decision processes (MDPs), quantile risk measures such as Value-at-Risk are a standard metric for modeling RL agents' preferences for certain outcomes. This paper proposes a new Q-learning algorithm for quantile optimization in…
Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) have been used to formulate many decision-making problems in science and engineering. The objective is to synthesize the best decision (action selection) policies to maximize expected rewards (minimize…
Robust Markov decision processes (RMDPs) provide a promising framework for computing reliable policies in the face of model errors. Many successful reinforcement learning algorithms build on variations of policy-gradient methods, but…
Constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP) is a natural framework for reinforcement learning tasks with safety constraints, where agents learn a policy that maximizes the long-term reward while satisfying the constraints on the long-term…
The general sequential decision-making problem, which includes Markov decision processes (MDPs) and partially observable MDPs (POMDPs) as special cases, aims at maximizing a cumulative reward by making a sequence of decisions based on a…
This work provides a novel interpretation of Markov Decision Processes (MDP) from the online optimization viewpoint. In such an online optimization context, the policy of the MDP is viewed as the decision variable while the corresponding…
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)…
We study the minimization of a spectral risk measure of the total discounted cost generated by a Markov Decision Process (MDP) over a finite or infinite planning horizon. The MDP is assumed to have Borel state and action spaces and the cost…
Despite the advances in probabilistic model checking, the scalability of the verification methods remains limited. In particular, the state space often becomes extremely large when instantiating parameterized Markov decision processes…
We investigate the classical active pure exploration problem in Markov Decision Processes, where the agent sequentially selects actions and, from the resulting system trajectory, aims at identifying the best policy as fast as possible. We…
In many sequential decision-making problems one is interested in minimizing an expected cumulative cost while taking into account \emph{risk}, i.e., increased awareness of events of small probability and high consequences. Accordingly, the…
The curse of dimensionality is a widely known issue in reinforcement learning (RL). In the tabular setting where the state space $\mathcal{S}$ and the action space $\mathcal{A}$ are both finite, to obtain a nearly optimal policy with…
In this paper, we consider a modified version of the control problem in a model free Markov decision process (MDP) setting with large state and action spaces. The control problem most commonly addressed in the contemporary literature is to…
In contrast to the advances in characterizing the sample complexity for solving Markov decision processes (MDPs), the optimal statistical complexity for solving constrained MDPs (CMDPs) remains unknown. We resolve this question by providing…
Motivated by many application problems, we consider Markov decision processes (MDPs) with a general loss function and unknown parameters. To mitigate the epistemic uncertainty associated with unknown parameters, we take a Bayesian approach…
We investigate the problem of best policy identification in discounted linear Markov Decision Processes in the fixed confidence setting under a generative model. We first derive an instance-specific lower bound on the expected number of…
We propose a general framework for entropy-regularized average-reward reinforcement learning in Markov decision processes (MDPs). Our approach is based on extending the linear-programming formulation of policy optimization in MDPs to…
We consider the problem: is the optimal expected total reward to reach a goal state in a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) below a given threshold? We tackle this -- generally undecidable -- problem by computing…