Related papers: Planning for Risk-Aversion and Expected Value in M…

In this paper we provide faster algorithms for approximately solving discounted Markov Decision Processes in multiple parameter regimes. Given a discounted Markov Decision Process (DMDP) with $|S|$ states, $|A|$ actions, discount factor…

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…

Markov decision processes (MDPs) are used to model stochastic systems in many applications. Several efficient algorithms to compute optimal policies have been studied in the literature, including value iteration (VI) and policy iteration.…

We consider the sequential decision problem faced by the manager of an electric vehicle (EV) charging station, who aims to satisfy the charging demand of the customer while minimizing cost. Since the total time needed to charge the EV up to…

This paper studies optimal motion planning subject to motion and environment uncertainties. By modeling the system as a probabilistic labeled Markov decision process (PL-MDP), the control objective is to synthesize a finite-memory policy,…

In many sequential decision-making problems we may want to manage risk by minimizing some measure of variability in rewards in addition to maximizing a standard criterion. Variance related risk measures are among the most common…

We study a first-order primal-dual subgradient method to optimize risk-constrained risk-penalized optimization problems, where risk is modeled via the popular conditional value at risk (CVaR) measure. The algorithm processes independent and…

We study risk-sensitive RL where the goal is learn a history-dependent policy that optimizes some risk measure of cumulative rewards. We consider a family of risks called the optimized certainty equivalents (OCE), which captures important…

This paper is devoted to studying constrained continuous-time Markov decision processes (MDPs) in the class of randomized policies depending on state histories. The transition rates may be unbounded, the reward and costs are admitted to be…

Relational Markov Decision Processes are a useful abstraction for complex reinforcement learning problems and stochastic planning problems. Recent work developed representation schemes and algorithms for planning in such problems using the…

This paper considers the problem of finding near-optimal Markovian randomized (MR) policies for finite-state-action, infinite-horizon, constrained risk-sensitive Markov decision processes (CRSMDPs). Constraints are in the form of standard…

Considering non-stationary environments in online optimization enables decision-maker to effectively adapt to changes and improve its performance over time. In such cases, it is favorable to adopt a strategy that minimizes the negative…

Risk-sensitive planning aims to identify policies maximizing some tail-focused metrics in Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). Such an optimization task can be very costly for the most widely used and interpretable metrics such as threshold…

The goal of a traditional Markov decision process (MDP) is to maximize expected cumulative reward over a defined horizon (possibly infinite). In many applications, however, a decision maker may be interested in optimizing a specific…

Partially-observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) with discounted-sum payoff are a standard framework to model a wide range of problems related to decision making under uncertainty. Traditionally, the goal has been to obtain policies…

We consider the problem of controlling a fully specified Markov decision process (MDP), also known as the planning problem, when the state space is very large and calculating the optimal policy is intractable. Instead, we pursue the more…

This paper studies the problem of data collection for policy evaluation in Markov decision processes (MDPs). In policy evaluation, we are given a target policy and asked to estimate the expected cumulative reward it will obtain in an…

We propose a new method for optimistic planning in infinite-horizon discounted Markov decision processes based on the idea of adding regularization to the updates of an otherwise standard approximate value iteration procedure. This…

Optimizing Conditional Value-at-risk (CVaR) using policy gradient (a.k.a CVaR-PG) faces significant challenges of sample inefficiency. This inefficiency stems from the fact that it focuses on tail-end performance and overlooks many sampled…

Practical reinforcement learning problems are often formulated as constrained Markov decision process (CMDP) problems, in which the agent has to maximize the expected return while satisfying a set of prescribed safety constraints. In this…