English
Related papers

Related papers: Expert-Guided Symmetry Detection in Markov Decisio…

200 papers

Recent research in decision theoretic planning has focussed on making the solution of Markov decision processes (MDPs) more feasible. We develop a family of algorithms for structured reachability analysis of MDPs that are suitable when an…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2013-04-24 Craig Boutilier , Ronen I. Brafman , Christopher W. Geib

Real-world reinforcement learning is often \emph{nonstationary}: rewards and dynamics drift, accelerate, oscillate, and trigger abrupt switches in the optimal action. Existing theory often represents nonstationarity with coarse-scale models…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Zuyuan Zhang , Mahdi Imani , Tian Lan

Robust Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) are receiving much attention in learning a robust policy which is less sensitive to environment changes. There are an increasing number of works analyzing sample-efficiency of robust MDPs. However,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-09-13 Wenhao Yang , Han Wang , Tadashi Kozuno , Scott M. Jordan , Zhihua Zhang

Markov decision processes (MDPs) are a popular model for performance analysis and optimization of stochastic systems. The parameters of stochastic behavior of MDPs are estimates from empirical observations of a system; their values are not…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-10-26 Dimitri Scheftelowitsch , Peter Buchholz , Vahid Hashemi , Holger Hermanns

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.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-08-26 Abed AlRahman Al Makdah , Oliver Kosut , Lalitha Sankar , Shaofeng Zou

Autonomous agents are limited in their ability to observe the world state. Partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) formally model the problem of planning under world state uncertainty, but POMDPs with continuous actions and…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-07-08 Dicong Qiu , Yibiao Zhao , Chris L. Baker

Abstraction of Markov Decision Processes is a useful tool for solving complex problems, as it can ignore unimportant aspects of an environment, simplifying the process of learning an optimal policy. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-20 Ondrej Biza , Robert Platt

We study the offline data-driven sequential decision making problem in the framework of Markov decision process (MDP). In order to enhance the generalizability and adaptivity of the learned policy, we propose to evaluate each policy by a…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2021-11-11 Zhengling Qi , Peng Liao

Robust Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) address environmental shift through distributionally robust optimization (DRO) by finding an optimal worst-case policy within an uncertainty set of transition kernels. However, standard DRO approaches…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-10 Akram S. Awad , Shihab Ahmed , Yue Wang , George K. Atia

We study infinite-horizon robust Markov decision processes (MDPs) on continuous state spaces with structured rectangular ambiguity set. The proposed ambiguity set falls within the convex hull of unknown generating kernels. We utilize the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-28 Mengmeng Li , Yifan Hu , Daniel Kuhn , Yan Li

We present metrics for measuring state similarity in Markov decision processes (MDPs) with infinitely many states, including MDPs with continuous state spaces. Such metrics provide a stable quantitative analogue of the notion of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2012-07-09 Norman Ferns , Prakash Panangaden , Doina Precup

Algorithms developed under stationary Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) often face challenges in non-stationary environments, and infinite-horizon formulations may not directly apply to finite-horizon tasks. To address these limitations, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-03 Zhizuo Chen , Theodore T. Allen

A novel reinforcement learning scheme to synthesize policies for continuous-space Markov decision processes (MDPs) is proposed. This scheme enables one to apply model-free, off-the-shelf reinforcement learning algorithms for finite MDPs to…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-03-03 Abolfazl Lavaei , Fabio Somenzi , Sadegh Soudjani , Ashutosh Trivedi , Majid Zamani

Learning a near optimal policy in a partially observable system remains an elusive challenge in contemporary reinforcement learning. In this work, we consider episodic reinforcement learning in a reward-mixing Markov decision process (MDP).…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-01 Jeongyeol Kwon , Yonathan Efroni , Constantine Caramanis , Shie Mannor

Advances in mobile computing technologies have made it possible to monitor and apply data-driven interventions across complex systems in real time. Markov decision processes (MDPs) are the primary model for sequential decision problems with…

Methodology · Statistics 2018-03-20 Longshaokan Wang , Eric B. Laber , Katie Witkiewitz

We present a unified framework based on primal-dual stochastic mirror descent for approximately solving infinite-horizon Markov decision processes (MDPs) given a generative model. When applied to an average-reward MDP with $A_{tot}$ total…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-31 Yujia Jin , Aaron Sidford

We introduce a new formulation of the Hidden Parameter Markov Decision Process (HiP-MDP), a framework for modeling families of related tasks using low-dimensional latent embeddings. Our new framework correctly models the joint uncertainty…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-11-01 Taylor Killian , Samuel Daulton , George Konidaris , Finale Doshi-Velez

This paper addresses the challenge of a particular class of noisy state observations in Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), a common issue in various real-world applications. We focus on modeling this uncertainty through a confusion matrix…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-15 Amirhossein Afsharrad , Sanjay Lall

Markov decision processes (MDPs) are used to model a wide variety of applications ranging from game playing over robotics to finance. Their optimal policy typically maximizes the expected sum of rewards given at each step of the decision…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-26 Maximilian Nägele , Jan Olle , Thomas Fösel , Remmy Zen , Florian Marquardt

Conventional imitation learning assumes access to the actions of demonstrators, but these motor signals are often non-observable in naturalistic settings. Additionally, sequential decision-making behaviors in these settings can deviate from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Aoyang Qin , Feng Gao , Qing Li , Song-Chun Zhu , Sirui Xie