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For a Markov decision process with countably infinite states, the optimal value may not be achievable in the set of stationary policies. In this paper, we study the existence conditions of an optimal stationary policy in a countable-state…
We consider infinite-horizon stationary $\gamma$-discounted Markov Decision Processes, for which it is known that there exists a stationary optimal policy. Using Value and Policy Iteration with some error $\epsilon$ at each iteration, it is…
We propose a novel randomized linear programming algorithm for approximating the optimal policy of the discounted Markov decision problem. By leveraging the value-policy duality and binary-tree data structures, the algorithm adaptively…
Euclidean Markov decision processes are a powerful tool for modeling control problems under uncertainty over continuous domains. Finite state imprecise, Markov decision processes can be used to approximate the behavior of these infinite…
Markov decision process (MDP) is a decision making framework where a decision maker is interested in maximizing the expected discounted value of a stream of rewards received at future stages at various states which are visited according to…
In this paper we build on previous work which uses inferences techniques, in particular Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods, to solve parameterized control problems. We propose a number of modifications in order to make this approach…
In this work, we investigate the optimal control problem for continuous-time Markov decision processes with the random impact of the environment. We provide conditions to show the existence of optimal controls under finite-horizon criteria.…
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…
Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) have been used to formulate many decision-making problems in science and engineering. The objective is to synthesize the best decision (action selection) policies to maximize expected rewards (minimize…
We study the problem of learning Markov decision processes with finite state and action spaces when the transition probability distributions and loss functions are chosen adversarially and are allowed to change with time. We introduce an…
We consider the challenge of finding a deterministic policy for a Markov decision process that uniformly (in all states) maximizes one reward subject to a probabilistic constraint over a different reward. Existing solutions do not fully…
We present a new, tractable method for solving and analyzing risk-aware control problems over finite and infinite, discounted time-horizons where the dynamics of the controlled process are described as a martingale problem. Supposing…
We consider the problem of computing optimal policies in average-reward Markov decision processes. This classical problem can be formulated as a linear program directly amenable to saddle-point optimization methods, albeit with a number of…
Markov decision processes are typically used for sequential decision making under uncertainty. For many aspects however, ranging from constrained or safe specifications to various kinds of temporal (non-Markovian) dependencies in task and…
The Markowitz problem consists of finding in a financial market a self-financing trading strategy whose final wealth has maximal mean and minimal variance. We study this in continuous time in a general semimartingale model and under cone…
Markov control algorithms that perform smooth, non-greedy updates of the policy have been shown to be very general and versatile, with policy gradient and Expectation Maximisation algorithms being particularly popular. For these algorithms,…
Computational level explanations based on optimal feedback control with signal-dependent noise have been able to account for a vast array of phenomena in human sensorimotor behavior. However, commonly a cost function needs to be assumed for…
We consider a Markov decision process subject to model uncertainty in a Bayesian framework, where we assume that the state process is observed but its law is unknown to the observer. In addition, while the state process and the controls are…
In this paper we consider stopping problems for continuous-time Markov chains under a general risk-sensitive optimization criterion for problems with finite and infinite time horizon. More precisely our aim is to maximize the certainty…
We consider a stochastic, dynamic job scheduling problem, formulated as a queueing control problem, in which a single server processes jobs of different types that arrive according to independent Poisson processes. The problem is defined on…