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We propose adaptive, line search-free second-order methods with optimal rate of convergence for solving convex-concave min-max problems. By means of an adaptive step size, our algorithms feature a simple update rule that requires solving…
In single-agent Markov decision processes, an agent can optimize its policy based on the interaction with environment. In multi-player Markov games (MGs), however, the interaction is non-stationary due to the behaviors of other players, so…
Piecewise deterministic Markov processes (PDMPs) are a class of continuous-time Markov processes that were recently used to develop a new class of Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms. However, the implementation of the processes is…
Motivated by Bland's linear-programming generalization of the renowned Edmonds-Karp efficient refinement of the Ford-Fulkerson maximum-flow algorithm, we discuss three closely-related natural augmentation rules for linear and integer-linear…
A key problem in reinforcement learning for control with general function approximators (such as deep neural networks and other nonlinear functions) is that, for many algorithms employed in practice, updates to the policy or $Q$-function…
We revisit the problem of finding optimal strategies for deterministic Markov Decision Processes (DMDPs), and a closely related problem of testing feasibility of systems of $m$ linear inequalities on $n$ real variables with at most two…
The problem of constrained Markov decision process (CMDP) is investigated, where an agent aims to maximize the expected accumulated discounted reward subject to multiple constraints on its utilities/costs. A new primal-dual approach is…
Repeated recursion unfolding is a new approach that repeatedly unfolds a recursion with itself and simplifies it while keeping all unfolded rules. Each unfolding doubles the number of recursive steps covered. This reduces the number of…
We study the problem of computing deterministic optimal policies for constrained Markov decision processes (MDPs) with continuous state and action spaces, which are widely encountered in constrained dynamical systems. Designing…
This paper is devoted to studying constrained continuous-time Markov decision processes (MDPs) in the class of randomized policies depending on state histories. The transition rates may be unbounded, the reward and costs are admitted to be…
We revisit the finite time analysis of policy gradient methods in the one of the simplest settings: finite state and action MDPs with a policy class consisting of all stochastic policies and with exact gradient evaluations. There has been…
In this paper we study a model-based approach to calculating approximately optimal policies in Markovian Decision Processes. In particular, we derive novel bounds on the loss of using a policy derived from a factored linear model, a class…
The study of the fundamental limits of information systems is a central theme in information theory. Both the traditional analytical approach and the recently proposed computational approach have significant limitations, where the former is…
Dynamic routing is one of the representative control scheme in transportation, production lines, and data transmission. In the modern context of connectivity and autonomy, routing decisions are potentially vulnerable to malicious attacks.…
We study fundamental block-structured integer programs called tree-fold and multi-stage IPs. Tree-fold IPs admit a constraint matrix with independent blocks linked together by few constraints in a recursive pattern; and transposing their…
Safe Policy Improvement (SPI) aims at provable guarantees that a learned policy is at least approximately as good as a given baseline policy. Building on SPI with Soft Baseline Bootstrapping (Soft-SPIBB) by Nadjahi et al., we identify…
In this paper, we propose a novel policy iteration method, called dynamic policy programming (DPP), to estimate the optimal policy in the infinite-horizon Markov decision processes. We prove the finite-iteration and asymptotic l\infty-norm…
This paper explores optimization of paging and registration policies in cellular networks. Motion is modeled as a discrete-time Markov process, and minimization of the discounted, infinite-horizon average cost is addressed. The structure of…
This note summarizes the optimization formulations used in the study of Markov decision processes. We consider both the discounted and undiscounted processes under the standard and the entropy-regularized settings. For each setting, we…
We consider the problem of learning the optimal policy for infinite-horizon Markov decision processes (MDPs). For this purpose, some variant of Stochastic Mirror Descent is proposed for convex programming problems with Lipschitz-continuous…