Related papers: Model approximation in MDPs with unbounded per-ste…

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 infinite-horizon Discounted Markov Decision Processes (DMDPs) under a generative model. Motivated by the Algorithm with Advice framework Mitzenmacher and Vassilvitskii 2022, we propose a novel framework to investigate how a…

Models of many real-life applications, such as queuing models of communication networks or computing systems, have a countably infinite state-space. Algorithmic and learning procedures that have been developed to produce optimal policies…

Many real-world applications, such as those in medical domains, recommendation systems, etc, can be formulated as large state space reinforcement learning problems with only a small budget of the number of policy changes, i.e., low…

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…

Efficient representations and solutions for large decision problems with continuous and discrete variables are among the most important challenges faced by the designers of automated decision support systems. In this paper, we describe a…

In this paper, we consider solving discounted Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) under the constraint that the resulting policy is stabilizing. In practice MDPs are solved based on some form of policy approximation. We will leverage recent…

We study an approximation method for partially observed Markov decision processes (POMDPs) with continuous spaces. Belief MDP reduction, which has been the standard approach to study POMDPs requires rigorous approximation methods for…

In this paper, for Markov decision processes (MDPs) with unbounded state spaces we present refined upper bounds presented in [Kara et. al. JMLR'23] on finite model approximation errors via optimizing the quantizers used for finite model…

A standard way of finding a feedback law that stabilizes a control system to an operating point is to recast the problem as an infinite horizon optimal control problem. If the optimal cost and the optmal feedback can be found on a large…

Model predictive control (MPC) schemes are commonly designed with fixed, i.e., time-invariant, horizon length and cost functions. If no stabilizing terminal ingredients are used, stability can be guaranteed via a sufficiently long horizon.…

We are interested in risk constraints for infinite horizon discrete time Markov decision processes (MDPs). Starting with average reward MDPs, we show that increasing concave stochastic dominance constraints on the empirical distribution of…

We consider a finite-state partially observable Markov decision problem (POMDP) with an infinite horizon and a discounted cost, and we propose a new method for computing a cost function approximation that is based on features and…

A tenet of reinforcement learning is that the agent always observes rewards. However, this is not true in many realistic settings, e.g., a human observer may not always be available to provide rewards, sensors may be limited or…

We study the evaluation of a policy under best- and worst-case perturbations to a Markov decision process (MDP), using transition observations from the original MDP, whether they are generated under the same or a different policy. This is…

Regularized MDPs serve as a smooth version of original MDPs. However, biased optimal policy always exists for regularized MDPs. Instead of making the coefficient{\lambda}of regularized term sufficiently small, we propose an adaptive…

Howard's Policy Iteration (HPI) is a classic algorithm for solving Markov Decision Problems (MDPs). HPI uses a "greedy" switching rule to update from any non-optimal policy to a dominating one, iterating until an optimal policy is found.…

Robust Markov decision processes (MDPs) provide a general framework to model decision problems where the system dynamics are changing or only partially known. Efficient methods for some \texttt{sa}-rectangular robust MDPs exist, using its…

This paper investigates the optimization problem of an infinite stage discrete time Markov decision process (MDP) with a long-run average metric considering both mean and variance of rewards together. Such performance metric is important…

In the optimization of dynamic systems, the variables typically have constraints. Such problems can be modeled as a Constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP). This paper considers the peak Constrained Markov Decision Process (PCMDP), where…