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This paper studies the computation of robust deterministic policies for Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) in the Lightning Does Not Strike Twice (LDST) model of Mannor, Mebel and Xu (ICML '12). In this model, designed to provide robustness…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-12-18 Fei Wu , Erik Demeulemeester , Jannik Matuschke

A tenet of reinforcement learning is that the agent always observes rewards. However, this is not true in many realistic settings, e.g., a human observer may not always be available to provide rewards, sensors may be limited or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Alireza Kazemipour , Simone Parisi , Matthew E. Taylor , Michael Bowling

The ability to compute reward-optimal policies for given and known finite Markov decision processes (MDPs) underpins a variety of applications across planning, controller synthesis, and verification. However, we often want policies (1) to…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Linus Heck , Filip Macák , Milan Češka , Sebastian Junges

Markov decision processes (MDPs) are a standard model for sequential decision-making problems and are widely used across many scientific areas, including formal methods and artificial intelligence (AI). MDPs do, however, come with the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-12-11 Marnix Suilen , Thom Badings , Eline M. Bovy , David Parker , Nils Jansen

In Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with intermittent state information, decision-making becomes challenging due to periods of missing observations. Linear programming (LP) methods can play a crucial role in solving MDPs, in particular,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-09-09 Konstantin Avrachenkov , Madhu Dhiman , Veeraruna Kavitha

We consider synthesis of control policies that maximize the probability of satisfying given temporal logic specifications in unknown, stochastic environments. We model the interaction between the system and its environment as a Markov…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2014-05-01 Jie Fu , Ufuk Topcu

We study a class of sequential decision-making problems with augmented predictions, potentially provided by a machine learning algorithm. In this setting, the decision-maker receives prediction intervals for unknown parameters that become…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-05 Xin Chen , Yuze Chen , Yuan Zhou

We consider Markov decision processes (MDPs) in which the transition probabilities and rewards belong to an uncertainty set parametrized by a collection of random variables. The probability distributions for these random parameters are…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2020-02-26 Murat Cubuktepe , Nils Jansen , Sebastian Junges , Joost-Pieter Katoen , Ufuk Topcu

Interval Markov Decision Processes (IMDPs) are finite-state uncertain Markov models, where the transition probabilities belong to intervals. Recently, there has been a surge of research on employing IMDPs as abstractions of stochastic…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-02-18 Giannis Delimpaltadakis , Morteza Lahijanian , Manuel Mazo , Luca Laurenti

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

Markov decision processes (MDPs) are the defacto frame-work for sequential decision making in the presence ofstochastic uncertainty. A classical optimization criterion forMDPs is to maximize the expected discounted-sum pay-off, which…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-02-28 Tomas Brazdil , Krishnendu Chatterjee , Petr Novotny , Jiri Vahala

In this work, we study discrete-time Markov decision processes (MDPs) under constraints with Borel state and action spaces and where all the performance functions have the same form of the expected total reward (ETR) criterion over the…

Probability · Mathematics 2019-05-10 F. Dufour , Alexandre Genadot

Reinforcement learning algorithms are typically designed for generic Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), where any state-action pair can lead to an arbitrary transition distribution. In many practical systems, however, only a subset of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Davide Maran , Davide Salaorni , Marcello Restelli

Stochastic and soft optimal policies resulting from entropy-regularized Markov decision processes (ER-MDP) are desirable for exploration and imitation learning applications. Motivated by the fact that such policies are sensitive with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-03 Tien Mai , Patrick Jaillet

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…

Performance · Computer Science 2017-09-08 Jan Křetínský , Tobias Meggendorfer

Positive dependencies have been compared in the literature under rather strong assumptions such as equality of conditional distributions, exchangeability, or stationarity. We establish supermodular ordering results for distributions that…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-11-11 Jonathan Ansari , Moritz Ritter

This paper studies Markov Decision Processes under parameter uncertainty. We adapt the distributionally robust optimization framework, and assume that the uncertain parameters are random variables following an unknown distribution, and…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2015-05-14 Pengqian Yu , Huan Xu

Policy Iteration (PI) is a widely used family of algorithms to compute optimal policies for Markov Decision Problems (MDPs). We derive upper bounds on the running time of PI on Deterministic MDPs (DMDPs): the class of MDPs in which every…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2023-10-10 Ritesh Goenka , Eashan Gupta , Sushil Khyalia , Pratyush Agarwal , Mulinti Shaik Wajid , Shivaram Kalyanakrishnan

We consider Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) in which every stationary policy induces the same graph structure for the underlying Markov chain and further, the graph has the following property: if we replace each recurrent class by a node,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-10 Joseph Lubars , Anna Winnicki , Michael Livesay , R. Srikant

This paper deals with control of partially observable discrete-time stochastic systems. It introduces and studies Markov Decision Processes with Incomplete Information and with semi-uniform Feller transition probabilities. The important…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-08-30 Eugene A. Feinberg , Pavlo O. Kasyanov , Michael Z. Zgurovsky