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Markov decision processes (MDPs) are widely used in modeling decision making problems in stochastic environments. However, precise specification of the reward functions in MDPs is often very difficult. Recent approaches have focused on…
The possibility of errors in human-engineered formal verification software, such as model checkers, poses a serious threat to the purpose of these tools. An established approach to mitigate this problem are certificates -- lightweight,…
This paper studies convergence properties of optimal values and actions for discounted and average-cost Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with weakly continuous transition probabilities and applies these properties to the stochastic…
We consider the problem of constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP) where an agent interacts with a unichain Markov Decision Process. At every interaction, the agent obtains a reward. Further, there are $K$ cost functions. The agent aims…
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…
This paper shows that the optimal policy and value functions of a Markov Decision Process (MDP), either discounted or not, can be captured by a finite-horizon undiscounted Optimal Control Problem (OCP), even if based on an inexact model.…
In this paper, we provide a novel algorithm for solving planning and learning problems of Markov decision processes. The proposed algorithm follows a policy iteration-type update by using a rank-one approximation of the transition…
In this paper, we consider reinforcement learning of Markov Decision Processes (MDP) with peak constraints, where an agent chooses a policy to optimize an objective and at the same time satisfy additional constraints. The agent has to take…
In constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs) with adversarial rewards and constraints, a well-known impossibility result prevents any algorithm from attaining both sublinear regret and sublinear constraint violation, when competing…
We consider Markov decision processes (MDPs) with $\omega$-regular specifications given as parity objectives. We consider the problem of computing the set of almost-sure winning vertices from where the objective can be ensured with…
Suppose there are $n$ Markov chains and we need to pay a per-step \emph{price} to advance them. The "destination" states of the Markov chains contain rewards; however, we can only get rewards for a subset of them that satisfy a…
In this paper, we consider the optimal stopping problem on semi-Markov processes (SMPs) with finite horizon, and aim to establish the existence and computation of optimal stopping times. To achieve the goal, we first develop the main…
In the literature, existence of mean-field equilibria has been established for discrete-time mean field games under both the discounted cost and the average cost optimality criteria. In this paper, we provide a value iteration algorithm to…
We consider the problem of learning in adversarial Markov decision processes [MDPs] with an oblivious adversary in a full-information setting. The agent interacts with an environment during $T$ episodes, each of which consists of $H$…
We are interested in the analysis of very large continuous-time Markov chains (CTMCs) with many distinct rates. Such models arise naturally in the context of reliability analysis, e.g., of computer network performability analysis, of power…
This work examines the convergence of stochastic gradient-based optimization algorithms that use early stopping based on a validation function. The form of early stopping we consider is that optimization terminates when the norm of the…
We investigate the problem of optimal control synthesis for Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), addressing both qualitative and quantitative objectives. Specifically, we require the system to satisfy a qualitative task specified by a Linear…
State-of-the-art methods for solving 2-player zero-sum imperfect information games rely on linear programming or regret minimization, though not on dynamic programming (DP) or heuristic search (HS), while the latter are often at the core of…
We consider partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) with a set of target states and every transition is associated with an integer cost. The optimization objective we study asks to minimize the expected total cost till the…
We propose empirical dynamic programming algorithms for Markov decision processes (MDPs). In these algorithms, the exact expectation in the Bellman operator in classical value iteration is replaced by an empirical estimate to get `empirical…