Related papers: A unified worst case for classical simplex and pol…

The existence of a polynomial pivot rule for the simplex method for linear programming, policy iteration for Markov decision processes, and strategy improvement for parity games each are prominent open problems in their respective fields.…

The simplex method is a well-studied and widely-used pivoting method for solving linear programs. When Dantzig originally formulated the simplex method, he gave a natural pivot rule that pivots into the basis a variable with the most…

Policy Iteration (PI) is a classical family of algorithms to compute an optimal policy for any given Markov Decision Problem (MDP). The basic idea in PI is to begin with some initial policy and to repeatedly update the policy to one from an…

In this paper, a double-pivot simplex method is proposed. Two upper bounds of iteration numbers are derived. Applying one of the bounds to some special linear programming (LP) problems, such as LP with a totally unimodular matrix and Markov…

The existence of a pivot rule for the simplex method that guarantees a strongly polynomial run-time is a longstanding, fundamental open problem in the theory of linear programming. The leading pivot rule in theory is the shadow pivot rule,…

Policy iteration is a family of algorithms that are used to find an optimal policy for a given Markov Decision Problem (MDP). Simple Policy iteration (SPI) is a type of policy iteration where the strategy is to change the policy at exactly…

This paper discusses a data-driven, empirically-based framework to make algorithmic decisions or recommendations without expert knowledge. We improve the performance of two algorithmic case studies: the selection of a pivot rule for the…

Circuit-augmentation algorithms are generalizations of the Simplex method, where in each step one is allowed to move along a fixed set of directions, called circuits, that is a superset of the edges of a polytope. We show that in the…

The question whether the Simplex Algorithm admits an efficient pivot rule remains one of the most important open questions in discrete optimization. While many natural, deterministic pivot rules are known to yield exponential running times,…

Policy Iteration (PI) is a widely used family of algorithms to compute optimal policies for Markov Decision Problems (MDPs). We derive upper bounds on the running time of PI on Deterministic MDPs (DMDPs): the class of MDPs in which every…

We study policy iteration for infinite-horizon Markov decision processes. It has recently been shown policy iteration style algorithms have exponential lower bounds in a two player game setting. We extend these lower bounds to Markov…

We prove that the simplex method with the highest gain/most-negative-reduced cost pivoting rule converges in strongly polynomial time for deterministic Markov decision processes (MDPs) regardless of the discount factor. For a deterministic…

Deterministic Markov Decision Processes (DMDPs) are a mathematical framework for decision-making where the outcomes and future possible actions are deterministically determined by the current action taken. DMDPs can be viewed as a finite…

We address the problem of finding an optimal policy in a Markov decision process under a restricted policy class defined by the convex hull of a set of base policies. This problem is of great interest in applications in which a number of…

Solving Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) is a recurrent task in engineering. Even though it is known that solutions for minimizing the infinite horizon expected reward can be found in polynomial time using Linear Programming techniques,…

Given a Markov Decision Process (MDP) with $n$ states and a totalnumber $m$ of actions, we study the number of iterations needed byPolicy Iteration (PI) algorithms to converge to the optimal$\gamma$-discounted policy. We consider two…

Decision-making problems in uncertain or stochastic domains are often formulated as Markov decision processes (MDPs). Policy iteration (PI) is a popular algorithm for searching over policy-space, the size of which is exponential in the…

Ye showed recently that the simplex method with Dantzig pivoting rule, as well as Howard's policy iteration algorithm, solve discounted Markov decision processes (MDPs), with a constant discount factor, in strongly polynomial time. More…

The simplex algorithm is one of the most popular algorithms to solve linear programs (LPs). Starting at an extreme point solution of an LP, it performs a sequence of basis exchanges (called pivots) that allows one to move to a better…

We investigate the worst-case behavior of the simplex algorithm on linear programs with three variables, that is, on 3-dimensional simple polytopes. Among the pivot rules that we consider, the ``random edge'' rule yields the best asymptotic…