Related papers: Abstraction-Refinement for Hierarchical Probabilis…

Robust Markov decision processes (MDPs) aim to handle changing or partially known system dynamics. To solve them, one typically resorts to robust optimization methods. However, this significantly increases computational complexity and…

Abstraction (in its various forms) is a powerful established technique in model-checking; still, when unbounded data-structures are concerned, it cannot always cope with divergence phenomena in a satisfactory way. Acceleration is an…

Machines that can replicate human intelligence with type 2 reasoning capabilities should be able to reason at multiple levels of spatio-temporal abstractions and scales using internal world models. Devising formalisms to develop such…

Modern safety-critical systems are heterogeneous, complex, and highly dynamic. They require reliability evaluation methods that go beyond the classical static methods such as fault trees, event trees, or reliability block diagrams.…

Due to physiological variation, patients diagnosed with the same condition may exhibit divergent, but related, responses to the same treatments. Hidden Parameter Markov Decision Processes (HiP-MDPs) tackle this transfer-learning problem by…

A key component of model-based reinforcement learning (RL) is a dynamics model that predicts the outcomes of actions. Errors in this predictive model can degrade the performance of model-based controllers, and complex Markov decision…

Markov decision processes (MDPs) are a fundamental model for decision making under uncertainty. They exhibit non-deterministic choice as well as probabilistic uncertainty. Traditionally, verification algorithms assume exact knowledge of the…

Reinforcement learning (RL) on high-dimensional and complex problems relies on abstraction for improved efficiency and generalization. In this paper, we study abstraction in the continuous-control setting, and extend the definition of…

Neural networks are becoming a popular tool for solving many real-world problems such as object recognition and machine translation, thanks to its exceptional performance as an end-to-end solution. However, neural networks are complex…

We consider risk-sensitive Markov decision processes (MDPs), where the MDP model is influenced by a parameter which takes values in a compact metric space. We identify sufficient conditions under which small perturbations in the model…

State-of-the-art probabilistic model checkers perform verification on explicit-state Markov models defined in a high-level programming formalism like the PRISM modeling language. Typically, the low-level models resulting from such…

Markov chain analysis is a key technique in formal verification. A practical obstacle is that all probabilities in Markov models need to be known. However, system quantities such as failure rates or packet loss ratios, etc. are often not --…

We propose a compositional approach for constructing abstractions of general Markov decision processes using approximate probabilistic relations. The abstraction framework is based on the notion of $\delta$-lifted relations, using which one…

Markov decision processes (MDPs) are formal models commonly used in sequential decision-making. MDPs capture the stochasticity that may arise, for instance, from imprecise actuators via probabilities in the transition function. However, in…

Markov decision processes (MDPs) are widely used for modeling decision-making problems in robotics, automated control, and economics. Traditional MDPs assume that the decision maker (DM) knows all states and actions. However, this may not…

Markov decision processes (MDPs) are widely used for modeling decision-making problems in robotics, automated control, and economics. Traditional MDPs assume that the decision maker (DM) knows all states and actions. However, this may not…

We present a method for solving implicit (factored) Markov decision processes (MDPs) with very large state spaces. We introduce a property of state space partitions which we call epsilon-homogeneity. Intuitively, an epsilon-homogeneous…

Abstraction is crucial for effective sequential decision making in domains with large state spaces. In this work, we propose an information bottleneck method for learning approximate bisimulations, a type of state abstraction. We use a deep…

Basic Parallel Processes (BPPs) are a well-known subclass of Petri Nets. They are the simplest common model of concurrent programs that allows unbounded spawning of processes. In the probabilistic version of BPPs, every process generates…

We consider the problem of approximating the reachability probabilities in Markov decision processes (MDP) with uncountable (continuous) state and action spaces. While there are algorithms that, for special classes of such MDP, provide a…