Related papers: Upper Bounds for All and Max-gain Policy Iteration…

This note provides upper bounds on the number of operations required to compute by value iterations a nearly optimal policy for an infinite-horizon discounted Markov decision process with a finite number of states and actions. For a given…

Structural results impose sufficient conditions on the model parameters of a Markov decision process (MDP) so that the optimal policy is an increasing function of the underlying state. The classical assumptions for MDP structural results…

Solving partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) is highly intractable in general, at least in part because the optimal policy may be infinitely large. In this paper, we explore the problem of finding the optimal policy from…

Markov decision processes (MDPs) are a fundamental model in sequential decision making. Robust MDPs (RMDPs) extend this framework by allowing uncertainty in transition probabilities and optimizing against the worst-case realization of that…

Interval Markov decision processes are a class of Markov models where the transition probabilities between the states belong to intervals. In this paper, we study the problem of efficient estimation of the optimal policies in Interval…

In this paper we propose an on-line policy iteration (PI) algorithm for finite-state infinite horizon discounted dynamic programming, whereby the policy improvement operation is done on-line, only for the states that are encountered during…

We study the problem of synthesizing a policy that maximizes the entropy of a Markov decision process (MDP) subject to a temporal logic constraint. Such a policy minimizes the predictability of the paths it generates, or dually, maximizes…

We consider the problem of learning the optimal threshold policy for control problems. Threshold policies make control decisions by evaluating whether an element of the system state exceeds a certain threshold, whose value is determined by…

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…

The policy improvement bound on the difference of the discounted returns plays a crucial role in the theoretical justification of the trust-region policy optimization (TRPO) algorithm. The existing bound leads to a degenerate bound when the…

Policy gradient methods are among the most effective methods in challenging reinforcement learning problems with large state and/or action spaces. However, little is known about even their most basic theoretical convergence properties,…

Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) are the most common model for decision making under uncertainty in the Machine Learning community. An MDP captures non-determinism, probabilistic uncertainty, and an explicit model of action. A Reinforcement…

Regularization of control policies using entropy can be instrumental in adjusting predictability of real-world systems. Applications benefiting from such approaches range from, e.g., cybersecurity, which aims at maximal unpredictability, to…

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…

In this paper, we propose a novel policy iteration method, called dynamic policy programming (DPP), to estimate the optimal policy in the infinite-horizon Markov decision processes. We prove the finite-iteration and asymptotic l\infty-norm…

This paper addresses the problem of optimal control of robotic sensing systems aimed at autonomous information gathering in scenarios such as environmental monitoring, search and rescue, and surveillance and reconnaissance. The information…

A new mechanism for efficiently solving the Markov decision processes (MDPs) is proposed in this paper. We introduce the notion of reachability landscape where we use the Mean First Passage Time (MFPT) as a means to characterize the…

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…

Markov decision processes (MDPs) are the defacto frame-work for sequential decision making in the presence ofstochastic uncertainty. A classical optimization criterion forMDPs is to maximize the expected discounted-sum pay-off, which…

Multi-agent Markov Decision Processes (MMDPs) arise in a variety of applications including target tracking, control of multi-robot swarms, and multiplayer games. A key challenge in MMDPs occurs when the state and action spaces grow…