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We study offline-online reinforcement learning in linear mixture Markov decision processes (MDPs) under environment shift. In the offline phase, data are collected by an unknown behavior policy and may come from a mismatched environment,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Zhongjun Zhang , Sean R. Sinclair

Markov decision processes (MDPs) is viewed as an optimization of an objective function over certain linear operators over general function spaces. A new existence result is established for the existence of optimal policies in general MDPs,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-01 Abhishek Gupta , Aditya Mahajan

Dynamic optimization of mean and variance in Markov decision processes (MDPs) is a long-standing challenge caused by the failure of dynamic programming. In this paper, we propose a new approach to find the globally optimal policy for…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-02-28 Li Xia , Shuai Ma

This paper studies temporal planning in probabilistic environments, modeled as labeled Markov decision processes (MDPs), with user preferences over multiple temporal goals. Existing works reflect such preferences as a prioritized list of…

Formal Languages and Automata Theory · Computer Science 2023-04-25 Lening Li , Hazhar Rahmani , Jie Fu

Markov Decision Process (MDP) presents a mathematical framework to formulate the learning processes of agents in reinforcement learning. MDP is limited by the Markovian assumption that a reward only depends on the immediate state and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Bohao Qu , Xiaofeng Cao , Jielong Yang , Hechang Chen , Chang Yi , Ivor W. Tsang , Yew-Soon Ong

We study model-based learning of finite-window policies in tabular partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs). A common approach to learning under partial observability is to approximate unbounded history dependencies using…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Philip Jordan , Maryam Kamgarpour

Policy iteration enjoys a local quadratic rate of contraction, but its iterations are computationally expensive for Markov decision processes (MDPs) with a large number of states. In light of the connection between policy iteration and the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-11-09 Matilde Gargiani , Dominic Liao-McPherson , Andrea Zanelli , John Lygeros

Markov decision processes (MDP) are finite-state systems with both strategic and probabilistic choices. After fixing a strategy, an MDP produces a sequence of probability distributions over states. The sequence is eventually synchronizing…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2013-11-01 Laurent Doyen , Thierry Massart , Mahsa Shirmohammadi

We propose a new policy, called the LP-update policy, to solve finite horizon weakly-coupled Markov decision processes. The latter can be seen as multi-constraint multi-action bandits, and generalize the classical restless bandit problems.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-05-08 Nicolas Gast , Bruno Gaujal , Chen Yan

Most reinforcement learning methods are based upon the key assumption that the transition dynamics and reward functions are fixed, that is, the underlying Markov decision process is stationary. However, in many real-world applications, this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-23 Yash Chandak , Georgios Theocharous , Shiv Shankar , Martha White , Sridhar Mahadevan , Philip S. Thomas

Markov decision processes (MDPs) are the standard formalism for modelling sequential decision making in stochastic environments. Policy synthesis addresses the problem of how to control or limit the decisions an agent makes so that a given…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2017-10-09 Peter Baumgartner , Sylvie Thiébaux , Felipe Trevizan

We study the problem of offline imitation learning in Markov decision processes (MDPs), where the goal is to learn a well-performing policy given a dataset of state-action pairs generated by an expert policy. Complementing a recent line of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-09 Antoine Moulin , Gergely Neu , Luca Viano

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

This paper studies a finite-horizon Markov decision problem with information-theoretic constraints, where the goal is to minimize directed information from the controlled source process to the control process, subject to stage-wise cost…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-09-04 Zixuan He , Charalambos D. Charalambous , Photios A. Stavrou

We study the problem of online learning in a class of Markov decision processes known as linearly solvable MDPs. In the stationary version of this problem, a learner interacts with its environment by directly controlling the state…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-06-07 Gergely Neu , Vicenç Gómez

We consider online reinforcement learning (RL) in episodic Markov decision processes (MDPs) under the linear $q^\pi$-realizability assumption, where it is assumed that the action-values of all policies can be expressed as linear functions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-21 Gellért Weisz , András György , Csaba Szepesvári

In this paper, we provide a novel algorithm for solving planning and learning problems of Markov decision processes. The proposed algorithm follows a policy iteration-type update by using a rank-one approximation of the transition…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-23 Arman Sharifi Kolarijani , Tolga Ok , Peyman Mohajerin Esfahani , Mohamad Amin Sharif Kolarijani

Calculating optimal policies is known to be computationally difficult for Markov decision processes (MDPs) with Borel state and action spaces. This paper studies finite-state approximations of discrete time Markov decision processes with…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2016-09-23 Naci Saldi , Serdar Yüksel , Tamás Linder

We propose a new approach to the problem of searching a space of policies for a Markov decision process (MDP) or a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP), given a model. Our approach is based on the following observation: Any…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2013-01-18 Andrew Y. Ng , Michael I. Jordan

In this paper, we propose a novel policy iteration method, called dynamic policy programming (DPP), to estimate the optimal policy in the infinite-horizon Markov decision processes. We prove the finite-iteration and asymptotic l\infty-norm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2011-09-09 Mohammad Gheshlaghi Azar , Vicenc Gomez , Hilbert J. Kappen