Related papers: Geometric Policy Iteration for Markov Decision Pro…

We study the $(\varepsilon, \delta)$-PAC policy identification problem in finite-horizon episodic Markov Decision Processes. Existing approaches provide finite-time guarantees for approximate settings ($\varepsilon>0$) but suffer from high…

It is well known that for any finite state Markov decision process (MDP) there is a memoryless deterministic policy that maximizes the expected reward. For partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs), optimal memoryless policies…

We consider the task of estimating a structural model of dynamic decisions by a human agent based upon the observable history of implemented actions and visited states. This problem has an inherent nested structure: in the inner problem, an…

The standard Markov Decision Process (MDP) formulation hinges on the assumption that an action is executed immediately after it was chosen. However, assuming it is often unrealistic and can lead to catastrophic failures in applications such…

We study the synthesis of a policy in a Markov decision process (MDP) following which an agent reaches a target state in the MDP while minimizing its total discounted cost. The problem combines a reachability criterion with a discounted…

We study algorithms for average-cost reinforcement learning problems with value function approximation. Our starting point is the recently proposed POLITEX algorithm, a version of policy iteration where the policy produced in each iteration…

In many practical sequential decision-making problems, tracking the state of the environment incurs a sensing/communication/computation cost. In these settings, the agent's interaction with its environment includes the additional component…

Many real-world applications, such as those in medical domains, recommendation systems, etc, can be formulated as large state space reinforcement learning problems with only a small budget of the number of policy changes, i.e., low…

In this paper, we consider the finite-state approximation of a discrete-time constrained Markov decision process (MDP) under the discounted and average cost criteria. Using the linear programming formulation of the constrained discounted…

We propose a formulation of the stochastic cutting stock problem as a discounted infinite-horizon Markov decision process. At each decision epoch, given current inventory of items, an agent chooses in which patterns to cut objects in stock…

This paper studies convergence properties of optimal values and actions for discounted and average-cost Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with weakly continuous transition probabilities and applies these properties to the stochastic…

Standard value function approaches to finding policies for Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) are generally considered to be intractable for large models. The intractability of these algorithms is to a large extent a…

Ye showed recently that the simplex method with Dantzig pivoting rule, as well as Howard's policy iteration algorithm, solve discounted Markov decision processes (MDPs), with a constant discount factor, in strongly polynomial time. More…

Many control problems in environments that can be modeled as Markov decision processes (MDPs) concern infinite-time horizon specifications. The classical aim in this context is to compute a control policy that maximizes the probability of…

In this work, we contribute the first approach to solve infinite-horizon discounted general-utility Markov decision processes (GUMDPs) in the single-trial regime, i.e., when the agent's performance is evaluated based on a single trajectory.…

Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) are fundamental to decision-making under uncertainty. We introduce a novel scalable approach to accelerate upper bound estimation in Point-Based Value Iteration (PBVI) algorithms, the…

We introduce a class of models for multidimensional control problems which we call skip-free Markov decision processes on trees. We describe and analyse an algorithm applicable to Markov decision processes of this type that are skip-free in…

Policy gradient methods are extensively used in reinforcement learning as a way to optimize expected return. In this paper, we explore the evolution of the policy parameters, for a special class of exactly solvable POMDPs, as a…

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has significantly enhanced the reasoning capability of large language models by optimizing the arithmetic mean of token-level rewards. Unfortunately, GRPO is observed to suffer from unstable policy…

In this paper we consider the problem of computing an $\epsilon$-optimal policy of a discounted Markov Decision Process (DMDP) provided we can only access its transition function through a generative sampling model that given any…