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In most common settings of Markov Decision Process (MDP), an agent evaluate a policy based on expectation of (discounted) sum of rewards. However in many applications this criterion might not be suitable from two perspective: first, in risk…
The agent learns to organize decision behavior to achieve a behavioral goal, such as reward maximization, and reinforcement learning is often used for this optimization. Learning an optimal behavioral strategy is difficult under the…
While reinforcement learning has been increasingly applied to stochastic control, few studies have systematically examined policy-based methods in queuing environments modeled as a semi-Markov decision process (SMDP). To address this gap,…
In inverse reinforcement learning (IRL), a learning agent infers a reward function encoding the underlying task using demonstrations from experts. However, many existing IRL techniques make the often unrealistic assumption that the agent…
Unlike traditional reinforcement learning (RL), market-based RL is in principle applicable to worlds described by partially observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs), where an agent needs to learn short-term memories of relevant…
This paper proposes an observer-based framework for solving Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) when an accurate model is not available. We first propose to use a Moving Horizon Estimation-Model Predictive Control…
This paper investigates natural conditions for the existence of optimal policies for a Markov decision process with incomplete information (MDPII) and with expected total costs. The MDPII is the classic model of a controlled stochastic…
Policy Optimization (PO) methods are among the most popular Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms in practice. Recently, Sherman et al. [2023a] proposed a PO-based algorithm with rate-optimal regret guarantees under the linear Markov…
Learning Markov decision processes (MDPs) in the presence of the adversary is a challenging problem in reinforcement learning (RL). In this paper, we study RL in episodic MDPs with adversarial reward and full information feedback, where the…
Information theory has been very successful in obtaining performance limits for various problems such as communication, compression and hypothesis testing. Likewise, stochastic control theory provides a characterization of optimal policies…
This paper provides a relaxation of the sufficient conditions, and also an extension of the structural results for Partially Observed Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) given in Lovejoy (1987). Sufficient conditions are provided so that the…
Active classification, i.e., the sequential decision-making process aimed at data acquisition for classification purposes, arises naturally in many applications, including medical diagnosis, intrusion detection, and object tracking. In this…
This paper investigates the optimization problem of an infinite stage discrete time Markov decision process (MDP) with a long-run average metric considering both mean and variance of rewards together. Such performance metric is important…
Solving partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) with high dimensional and continuous observations, such as camera images, is required for many real life robotics and planning problems. Recent researches suggested machine…
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…
Decision-making under uncertainty is a critical aspect of many practical autonomous systems due to incomplete information. Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) offer a mathematically principled framework for formulating…
We study policy optimization problems for deterministic Markov decision processes (MDPs) with metric state and action spaces, which we refer to as Metric Policy Optimization Problems (MPOPs). Our goal is to establish theoretical results on…
We consider a partially observable Markov decision problem (POMDP) that models a class of sequencing problems. Although POMDPs are typically intractable, our formulation admits tractable solution. Instead of maintaining a value function…
In the Markov decision process model, policies are usually evaluated by expected cumulative rewards. As this decision criterion is not always suitable, we propose in this paper an algorithm for computing a policy optimal for the quantile…
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…