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We consider the reinforcement learning problem for partially observed Markov decision processes (POMDPs) with large or even countably infinite state spaces, where the controller has access to only noisy observations of the underlying…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-20 Semih Cayci , Niao He , R. Srikant

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2013-01-30 Nicolas Meuleau , Kee-Eung Kim , Leslie Pack Kaelbling , Anthony R. Cassandra

Policy-gradient methods have received increased attention recently as a mechanism for learning to act in partially observable environments. They have shown promise for problems admitting memoryless policies but have been less successful…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-08 Douglas Aberdeen , Jonathan Baxter

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…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2016-01-28 Mikko Lauri , Nikolay Atanasov , George J. Pappas , Risto Ritala

We study model-based learning of finite-window policies in tabular partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs). A common approach to learning under partial observability is to approximate unbounded history dependencies using…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Philip Jordan , Maryam Kamgarpour

In optimal control problem, policy iteration (PI) is a powerful reinforcement learning (RL) tool used for designing optimal controller for the linear systems. However, the need for an initial stabilizing control policy significantly limits…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-11-13 Zhen Pang , Shengda Tang , Jun Cheng , Shuping He

The synthesis problem for partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) is to compute a policy that satisfies a given specification. Such policies have to take the full execution history of a POMDP into account, rendering the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-07-20 Leonore Winterer , Ralf Wimmer , Nils Jansen , Bernd Becker

We study an approximation method for partially observed Markov decision processes (POMDPs) with continuous spaces. Belief MDP reduction, which has been the standard approach to study POMDPs requires rigorous approximation methods for…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-01-20 Ali Devran Kara , Erhan Bayraktar , Serdar Yuksel

Deterministic partially observable Markov decision processes (DetPOMDPs) often arise in planning problems where the agent is uncertain about its environmental state but can act and observe deterministically. In this paper, we propose…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-05-02 Alex Schutz , Yang You , Matias Mattamala , Ipek Caliskanelli , Bruno Lacerda , Nick Hawes

Safety is the priority concern when applying reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms to real-world control problems. While policy iteration provides a fundamental algorithm for standard RL, an analogous theoretical algorithm for safe RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-14 Yujie Yang , Zhilong Zheng , Shengbo Eben Li , Wei Xu , Jingjing Liu , Xianyuan Zhan , Ya-Qin Zhang

Within batch reinforcement learning, safe policy improvement (SPI) seeks to ensure that the learnt policy performs at least as well as the behavior policy that generated the dataset. The core challenge in SPI is seeking improvements while…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-15 Abhishek Sharma , Leo Benac , Sonali Parbhoo , Finale Doshi-Velez

Partially-Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) are a well-known stochastic model for sequential decision making under limited information. We consider the EXPTIME-hard problem of synthesising policies that almost-surely reach some…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-03-22 Sebastian Junges , Nils Jansen , Sanjit A. Seshia

We propose a new reinforcement learning algorithm for partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDP) based on spectral decomposition methods. While spectral methods have been previously employed for consistent learning of (passive)…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-06-20 Kamyar Azizzadenesheli , Alessandro Lazaric , Animashree Anandkumar

Policies for Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) are often designed using a nominal system model. In practice, this model can deviate from the true system during deployment due to factors such as calibration drift or…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-24 Benjamin Kraske , Qi Heng Ho , Federico Rossi , Morteza Lahijanian , Zachary Sunberg

Motivated from Bertsekas' recent study on policy iteration (PI) for solving the problems of infinite-horizon discounted Markov decision processes (MDPs) in an on-line setting, we develop an off-line PI integrated with a multi-policy…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-12-07 Hyeong Soo Chang

Memoryless and finite-memory policies offer a practical alternative for solving partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs), as they operate directly in the output space rather than in the high-dimensional belief space. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-15 Roy van Zuijlen , Duarte Antunes

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2016-02-16 Guido Montufar , Keyan Ghazi-Zahedi , Nihat Ay

Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms have shown tremendous success in simulation environments, but their application to real-world problems faces significant challenges, with safety being a major concern. In particular, enforcing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-19 Weiye Zhao , Rui Chen , Yifan Sun , Tianhao Wei , Changliu Liu

In this paper, we propose a policy gradient method for confounded partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) with continuous state and observation spaces in the offline setting. We first establish a novel identification result…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-12-04 Mao Hong , Zhengling Qi , Yanxun Xu

In applications of offline reinforcement learning to observational data, such as in healthcare or education, a general concern is that observed actions might be affected by unobserved factors, inducing confounding and biasing estimates…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-24 Andrew Bennett , Nathan Kallus