Related papers: Risk Aware Adaptive Belief-dependent Probabilistic…
We explore the probabilistic foundations of shared control in complex dynamic environments. In order to do this, we formulate shared control as a random process and describe the joint distribution that governs its behavior. For…
Partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) form a prominent model for uncertainty in sequential decision making. We are interested in constructing algorithms with theoretical guarantees to determine whether the agent has a…
In many operational settings, decision-makers must commit to actions before uncertainty resolves, but existing optimization tools rarely quantify how consistently a chosen decision remains optimal across plausible scenarios. This paper…
We address the problem of computing reliable policies in reinforcement learning problems with limited data. In particular, we compute policies that achieve good returns with high confidence when deployed. This objective, known as the…
Probabilistic variants of Model Order Reduction (MOR) methods have recently emerged for improving stability and computational performance of classical approaches. In this paper, we propose a probabilistic Reduced Basis Method (RBM) for the…
We introduce a graceful approach to probabilistic inference called bounded conditioning. Bounded conditioning monotonically refines the bounds on posterior probabilities in a belief network with computation, and converges on final…
Several recent works have proposed instance-dependent upper bounds on the number of episodes needed to identify, with probability $1-\delta$, an $\varepsilon$-optimal policy in finite-horizon tabular Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). These…
This paper introduces a simple efficient learning algorithms for general sequential decision making. The algorithm combines Optimism for exploration with Maximum Likelihood Estimation for model estimation, which is thus named OMLE. We prove…
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 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…
This paper considers linear discrete-time systems with additive disturbances, and designs a Model Predictive Control (MPC) law to minimise a quadratic cost function subject to a chance constraint. The chance constraint is defined as a…
Stochastic domains often involve risk-averse decision makers. While recent work has focused on how to model risk in Markov decision processes using risk measures, it has not addressed the problem of solving large risk-averse formulations.…
We present a powerful general framework for designing data-dependent optimization algorithms, building upon and unifying recent techniques in adaptive regularization, optimistic gradient predictions, and problem-dependent randomization. We…
Model Predictive Control (MPC) is a successful control methodology, which is applied to increasingly complex systems. However, real-time feasibility of MPC can be challenging for complex systems, certainly when an (extremely) large number…
Designing provably safe control is a core problem in trustworthy autonomy. However, most prior work in this regard assumes either that the system dynamics are known or deterministic, or that the state and action space are finite,…
We consider partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) with a set of target states and positive integer costs associated with every transition. The traditional optimization objective (stochastic shortest path) asks to minimize…
In this paper, we study the Bayesian risk-averse formulation in reinforcement learning (RL). To address the epistemic uncertainty due to a lack of data, we adopt the Bayesian Risk Markov Decision Process (BRMDP) to account for the parameter…
In this paper, a risk-aware motion control scheme is considered for mobile robots to avoid randomly moving obstacles when the true probability distribution of uncertainty is unknown. We propose a novel model predictive control (MPC) method…
This paper addresses a key limitation in existing counterfactual inference methods for Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). Current approaches assume a specific causal model to make counterfactuals identifiable. However, there are usually many…
We propose a new method for optimistic planning in infinite-horizon discounted Markov decision processes based on the idea of adding regularization to the updates of an otherwise standard approximate value iteration procedure. This…