Related papers: Under-Approximating Expected Total Rewards in POMD…

We study regret minimization for infinite-horizon average-reward Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) under cost constraints. We start by designing a policy optimization algorithm with carefully designed action-value estimator and bonus term,…

Autonomous agents often operate in scenarios where the state is partially observed. In addition to maximizing their cumulative reward, agents must execute complex tasks with rich temporal and logical structures. These tasks can be expressed…

Monotonic Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs), where the system state progressively decreases until a restorative action is performed, can be used to model sequential repair problems effectively. This paper considers the…

Model checking undiscounted reachability and expected-reward properties on Markov decision processes (MDPs) is key for the verification of systems that act under uncertainty. Popular algorithms are policy iteration and variants of value…

We consider finite-state Markov decision processes with the combined Energy-MeanPayoff objective. The controller tries to avoid running out of energy while simultaneously attaining a strictly positive mean payoff in a second dimension. We…

We present a major improvement to the incremental pruning algorithm for solving partially observable Markov decision processes. Our technique targets the cross-sum step of the dynamic programming (DP) update, a key source of complexity in…

We study an optimal process control problem with multiple assignable causes. The process is initially in-control but is subject to random transition to one of multiple out-of-control states due to assignable causes. The objective is to find…

We give polynomial time algorithms for quantitative (and qualitative) reachability analysis for Branching Markov Decision Processes (BMDPs). Specifically, given a BMDP, and given an initial population, where the objective of the controller…

We study Markov decision processes (MDPs) with multiple limit-average (or mean-payoff) functions. We consider two different objectives, namely, expectation and satisfaction objectives. Given an MDP with k limit-average functions, in the…

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…

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…

Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) provide a principled mathematical framework for decision-making under uncertainty. However, the exact solution to POMDPs is computationally intractable. In this paper, we address the…

Many policy-based reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms can be viewed as instantiations of approximate policy iteration (PI), i.e., where policy improvement and policy evaluation are both performed approximately. In applications where the…

The synthesis problem for partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) is to compute a policy that satisfies a given specification. Such policies have to take the full execution history of a POMDP into account, rendering the…

Markov decision processes (MDPs) are standard models for probabilistic systems with non-deterministic behaviours. Mean payoff (or long-run average reward) provides a mathematically elegant formalism to express performance related…

One often encounters the curse of dimensionality in the application of dynamic programming to determine optimal policies for controlled Markov chains. In this paper, we provide a method to construct sub-optimal policies along with a bound…

This article deals with stochastic processes endowed with the Markov (memoryless) property and evolving over general (uncountable) state spaces. The models further depend on a non-deterministic quantity in the form of a control input, which…

We investigate partially observed Markov decision processes (POMDPs) with cost functions regularized by entropy terms describing state, observation, and control uncertainty. Standard POMDP techniques are shown to offer bounded-error…

We consider large-scale Markov decision processes (MDPs) with a risk measure of variability in cost, under the risk-aware MDPs paradigm. Previous studies showed that risk-aware MDPs, based on a minimax approach to handling risk, can be…

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…