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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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Ali Asadi , Krishnendu Chatterjee , Ehsan Goharshady , Mehrdad Karrabi , Alipasha Montaseri , Carlo Pagano

Markov decision processes (MDPs) with rewards are a widespread and well-studied model for systems that make both probabilistic and nondeterministic choices. A fundamental result about MDPs is that their minimal and maximal expected rewards…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2024-11-26 Kevin Batz , Benjamin Lucien Kaminski , Christoph Matheja , Tobias Winkler

The goal of a traditional Markov decision process (MDP) is to maximize expected cumulative reward over a defined horizon (possibly infinite). In many applications, however, a decision maker may be interested in optimizing a specific…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-16 Xiaocheng Li , Huaiyang Zhong , Margaret L. Brandeau

Markov chains and Markov decision processes (MDPs) are well-established probabilistic models. While finite Markov models are well-understood, analysing their infinite counterparts remains a significant challenge. Decisiveness has proven to…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2025-04-23 Nathalie Bertrand , Patricia Bouyer , Thomas Brihaye , Paulin Fournier , Pierre Vandenhove

Computing optimal conditional reachability probabilities in Markov decision processes (MDPs) is tractable by a reduction to reachability probabilities. Yet, this reduction yields cyclic, challenging MDPs that are often notoriously hard to…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Milan Češka , Sebastian Junges , Luko van der Maas , Filip Macák , Tim Quatmann

Markov decision processes (MDPs) are a popular model for performance analysis and optimization of stochastic systems. The parameters of stochastic behavior of MDPs are estimates from empirical observations of a system; their values are not…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-10-26 Dimitri Scheftelowitsch , Peter Buchholz , Vahid Hashemi , Holger Hermanns

This article presents the complexity of reachability decision problems for parametric Markov decision processes (pMDPs), an extension to Markov decision processes (MDPs) where transitions probabilities are described by polynomials over a…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2020-09-29 Sebastian Junges , Joost-Pieter Katoen , Guillermo A. Pérez , Tobias Winkler

Markov decision processes (MDPs) are a canonical model to reason about decision making within a stochastic environment. We study a fundamental class of infinite MDPs: one-counter MDPs (OC-MDPs). They extend finite MDPs via an associated…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Michal Ajdarów , James C. A. Main , Petr Novotný , Mickael Randour

Robust Markov decision processes (MDPs) are used for applications of dynamic optimization in uncertain environments and have been studied extensively. Many of the main properties and algorithms of MDPs, such as value iteration and policy…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-12-14 Julien Grand-Clément , Marek Petrik

This paper studies the computation of robust deterministic policies for Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) in the Lightning Does Not Strike Twice (LDST) model of Mannor, Mebel and Xu (ICML '12). In this model, designed to provide robustness…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-12-18 Fei Wu , Erik Demeulemeester , Jannik Matuschke

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 (or minimize…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2015-07-07 Mahmoud El Chamie , Behcet Acikmese

We consider online reinforcement learning in episodic Markov decision process (MDP) with unknown transition function and stochastic rewards drawn from some fixed but unknown distribution. The learner aims to learn the optimal policy and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-12 Vincent Leon , S. Rasoul Etesami

It is common to address the curse of dimensionality in Markov decision processes (MDPs) by exploiting low-rank representations. This motivates much of the recent theoretical study on linear MDPs. However, most approaches require a given…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-09 Tianjun Zhang , Tongzheng Ren , Mengjiao Yang , Joseph E. Gonzalez , Dale Schuurmans , Bo Dai

This paper proposes a new formulation for the dynamic resource allocation problem, which converts the traditional MDP model with known parameters and no capacity constraints to a new model with uncertain parameters and a resource capacity…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-11-10 Onur Demiray , Evrim Didem Güneş , Lerzan Örmeci

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-02-28 Tomas Brazdil , Krishnendu Chatterjee , Petr Novotny , Jiri Vahala

We present a general framework for applying learning algorithms and heuristical guidance to the verification of Markov decision processes (MDPs). The primary goal of our techniques is to improve performance by avoiding an exhaustive…

This paper studies parametric Markov decision processes (pMDPs), an extension to Markov decision processes (MDPs) where transitions probabilities are described by polynomials over a finite set of parameters. Fixing values for all parameters…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2019-04-03 Tobias Winkler , Sebastian Junges , Guillermo A. Pérez , Joost-Pieter Katoen

We consider large-scale Markov decision processes (MDPs) with parameter uncertainty, under the robust MDP paradigm. Previous studies showed that robust MDPs, based on a minimax approach to handle uncertainty, can be solved using dynamic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-06-27 Aviv Tamar , Huan Xu , Shie Mannor

Model checking undiscounted reachability and expected-reward properties on Markov decision processes (MDPs) is key for the verification of systems that act under uncertainty. Popular algorithms are policy iteration and variants of value…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2023-01-25 Arnd Hartmanns , Sebastian Junges , Tim Quatmann , Maximilian Weininger

Standard Markov decision process (MDP) and reinforcement learning algorithms optimize the policy with respect to the expected gain. We propose an algorithm which enables to optimize an alternative objective: the probability that the gain is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-06 Vincent Corlay , Jean-Christophe Sibel