Related papers: Rectangularity and duality of distributionally rob…
We often collect data from multiple sites (e.g., hospitals) that share common structure but also exhibit heterogeneity. This paper aims to learn robust sequential decision-making policies from such offline, multi-site datasets. To model…
The ability to compute reward-optimal policies for given and known finite Markov decision processes (MDPs) underpins a variety of applications across planning, controller synthesis, and verification. However, we often want policies (1) to…
Graph games are fundamental in strategic reasoning of multi-agent systems and their environments. We study a new family of graph games which combine stochastic environmental uncertainties and auction-based interactions among the agents,…
Contextual Markov decision processes (CMDPs) describe a class of reinforcement learning problems in which the transition kernels and reward functions can change over time with different MDPs indexed by a context variable. While CMDPs serve…
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…
Despite its prevalence, probabilistic bisimilarity suffers from a lack of robustness under minuscule perturbations of the transition probabilities. This can lead to discontinuities in the probabilistic bisimilarity distance function,…
Planning under uncertainty is a central problem in the study of automated sequential decision making, and has been addressed by researchers in many different fields, including AI planning, decision analysis, operations research, control…
Decision-making under distribution shift is a central challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), where training and deployment environments differ. We study this problem through the lens of robust Markov decision processes (RMDPs), which…
Distributionally robust optimization (DRO) provides a framework for training machine learning models that are able to perform well on a collection of related data distributions (the "uncertainty set"). This is done by solving a min-max…
Piecewise Deterministic Markov Processes (PDMPs) are studied in a general framework. First, different constructions are proven to be equivalent. Second, we introduce a coupling between two PDMPs following the same differential flow which…
Many problems in sequential decision making and stochastic control often have natural multiscale structure: sub-tasks are assembled together to accomplish complex goals. Systematically inferring and leveraging hierarchical structure,…
A basic model in sequential decision making is the Markov decision process (MDP), which is extended to Robust MDPs (RMDPs) by allowing uncertainty in transition probabilities and optimizing against the worst-case transition probabilities…
We study a class of multi-stage stochastic programs, which incorporate modeling features from Markov decision processes (MDPs). This class includes structured MDPs with continuous action and state spaces. We extend policy graphs to include…
We introduce a framework for approximate analysis of Markov decision processes (MDP) with bounded-, unbounded-, and infinite-horizon properties. The main idea is to identify a "core" of an MDP, i.e., a subsystem where we provably remain…
Distributionally robust optimization tackles out-of-sample issues like overfitting and distribution shifts by adopting an adversarial approach over a range of possible data distributions, known as the ambiguity set. To balance conservatism…
The goal of this paper is to analyze distributional Markov Decision Processes as a class of control problems in which the objective is to learn policies that steer the distribution of a cumulative reward toward a prescribed target law,…
We use a decision-theoretic framework to study the problem of forecasting discrete outcomes when the forecaster is unable to discriminate among a set of plausible forecast distributions because of partial identification or concerns about…
Graph games and Markov decision processes (MDPs) are standard models in reactive synthesis and verification of probabilistic systems with nondeterminism. The class of $\omega$-regular winning conditions; e.g., safety, reachability,…
We study the offline data-driven sequential decision making problem in the framework of Markov decision process (MDP). In order to enhance the generalizability and adaptivity of the learned policy, we propose to evaluate each policy by a…
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…