Related papers: Efficient Global Planning in Large MDPs via Stocha…
We study the online estimation of the optimal policy of a Markov decision process (MDP). We propose a class of Stochastic Primal-Dual (SPD) methods which exploit the inherent minimax duality of Bellman equations. The SPD methods update a…
We consider the problem of controlling a fully specified Markov decision process (MDP), also known as the planning problem, when the state space is very large and calculating the optimal policy is intractable. Instead, we pursue the more…
Large-scale Markov decision processes (MDPs) require planning algorithms with runtime independent of the number of states of the MDP. We consider the planning problem in MDPs using linear value function approximation with only weak…
We consider the problem of controlling a Markov decision process (MDP) with a large state space, so as to minimize average cost. Since it is intractable to compete with the optimal policy for large scale problems, we pursue the more modest…
Several well-known algorithms in the field of combinatorial optimization can be interpreted in terms of the primal-dual method for solving linear programs. For example, Dijkstra's algorithm, the Ford-Fulkerson algorithm, and the Hungarian…
We consider local planning in fixed-horizon MDPs with a generative model under the assumption that the optimal value function lies close to the span of a feature map. The generative model provides a local access to the MDP: The planner can…
We study the problem of computing deterministic optimal policies for constrained Markov decision processes (MDPs) with continuous state and action spaces, which are widely encountered in constrained dynamical systems. Designing…
We propose a doubly stochastic primal-dual coordinate optimization algorithm for empirical risk minimization, which can be formulated as a bilinear saddle-point problem. In each iteration, our method randomly samples a block of coordinates…
We study the problem of learning policy of an infinite-horizon, discounted cost, Markov decision process (MDP) with a large number of states. We compute the actions of a policy that is nearly as good as a policy chosen by a suitable oracle…
Existing work on linear constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs) has primarily focused on stochastic settings, where the losses and costs are either fixed or drawn from fixed distributions. However, such formulations are inherently…
Robust Markov decision processes (MDPs) allow to compute reliable solutions for dynamic decision problems whose evolution is modeled by rewards and partially-known transition probabilities. Unfortunately, accounting for uncertainty in the…
In this paper, We propose a general Riemannian proximal optimization algorithm with guaranteed convergence to solve Markov decision process (MDP) problems. To model policy functions in MDP, we employ Gaussian mixture model (GMM) and…
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…
In many operations management problems, we need to make decisions sequentially to minimize the cost while satisfying certain constraints. One modeling approach to study such problems is constrained Markov decision process (CMDP). When…
We study the Constrained Convex Markov Decision Process (MDP), where the goal is to minimize a convex functional of the visitation measure, subject to a convex constraint. Designing algorithms for a constrained convex MDP faces several…
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…
We provide performance guarantees for a variant of simulation-based policy iteration for controlling Markov decision processes that involves the use of stochastic approximation algorithms along with state-of-the-art techniques that are…
There is much interest in using partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) as a formal model for planning in stochastic domains. This paper is concerned with finding optimal policies for POMDPs. We propose several improvements…
This work develops novel strategies for optimal planning with semantic observations using continuous state partially observable markov decision processes (CPOMDPs). Two major innovations are presented in relation to Gaussian mixture (GM)…
This paper addresses the problem of planning under uncertainty in large Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). Factored MDPs represent a complex state space using state variables and the transition model using a dynamic Bayesian network. This…