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We introduce a unified framework to estimate the convergence of Markov chains to equilibrium in Wasserstein distance. The framework can provide convergence bounds with rates ranging from polynomial to exponential, all derived from a…

Probability · Mathematics 2025-06-09 Yanlin Qu , Jose Blanchet , Peter Glynn

We consider approximate dynamic programming for the infinite-horizon stationary $\gamma$-discounted optimal control problem formalized by Markov Decision Processes. While in the exact case it is known that there always exists an optimal…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2013-04-23 Boris Lesner , Bruno Scherrer

We present the first finite time global convergence analysis of policy gradient in the context of infinite horizon average reward Markov decision processes (MDPs). Specifically, we focus on ergodic tabular MDPs with finite state and action…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-12 Navdeep Kumar , Yashaswini Murthy , Itai Shufaro , Kfir Y. Levy , R. Srikant , Shie Mannor

Interval Markov Decision Processes (IMDPs) are finite-state uncertain Markov models, where the transition probabilities belong to intervals. Recently, there has been a surge of research on employing IMDPs as abstractions of stochastic…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-02-18 Giannis Delimpaltadakis , Morteza Lahijanian , Manuel Mazo , Luca Laurenti

We present a general framework for applying machine-learning algorithms to the verification of Markov decision processes (MDPs). The primary goal of these techniques is to improve performance by avoiding an exhaustive exploration of the…

We consider the problem of approximating the reachability probabilities in Markov decision processes (MDP) with uncountable (continuous) state and action spaces. While there are algorithms that, for special classes of such MDP, provide a…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-07-13 Kush Grover , Jan Křetínský , Tobias Meggendorfer , Maximilian Weininger

We present metrics for measuring the similarity of states in a finite Markov decision process (MDP). The formulation of our metrics is based on the notion of bisimulation for MDPs, with an aim towards solving discounted infinite horizon…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2012-07-19 Norman Ferns , Prakash Panangaden , Doina Precup

Markov decision processes (MDPs) are known to be sensitive to parameter specification. Distributionally robust MDPs alleviate this issue by allowing for \emph{ambiguity sets} which give a set of possible distributions over parameter sets.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-05-05 Julien Grand-Clément , Christian Kroer

Policy-based algorithms are among the most widely adopted techniques in model-free RL, thanks to their strong theoretical groundings and good properties in continuous action spaces. Unfortunately, these methods require precise and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-14 Luca Sabbioni , Francesco Corda , Marcello Restelli

Solving partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) with high dimensional and continuous observations, such as camera images, is required for many real life robotics and planning problems. Recent researches suggested machine…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Idan Lev-Yehudi , Moran Barenboim , Vadim Indelman

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-27 Francesco Emanuele Stradi , Anna Lunghi , Matteo Castiglioni , Alberto Marchesi , Nicola Gatti

This paper investigates the limit behavior of Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) made of independent particles evolving in a common environment, when the number of particles goes to infinity. In the finite horizon case or with a discounted…

Probability · Mathematics 2009-06-10 Nicolas Gast , Bruno Gaujal

We study policy optimization problems for deterministic Markov decision processes (MDPs) with metric state and action spaces, which we refer to as Metric Policy Optimization Problems (MPOPs). Our goal is to establish theoretical results on…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-07-14 Victor D. Dorobantu , Kamyar Azizzadenesheli , Yisong Yue

We introduce and study constrained Markov Decision Processes (cMDPs) with anytime constraints. An anytime constraint requires the agent to never violate its budget at any point in time, almost surely. Although Markovian policies are no…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-14 Jeremy McMahan , Xiaojin Zhu

Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs) are notably more complex to solve than standard MDPs due to the absence of universally optimal policies across all initial state distributions. This necessitates re-solving the CMDP whenever the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Alperen Tercan , Necmiye Ozay

For infinite-horizon average-cost criterion problems, there exist relatively few rigorous approximation and reinforcement learning results. In this paper, for Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with standard Borel spaces, (i) we first provide…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-12-10 Ali Devran Kara , Serdar Yuksel

We consider risk-sensitive Markov decision processes (MDPs), where the MDP model is influenced by a parameter which takes values in a compact metric space. We identify sufficient conditions under which small perturbations in the model…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-09-28 Shiping Shao , Abhishek Gupta , William B. Haskell

Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) are stochastic optimization problems that model situations where a decision maker controls a system based on its state. Partially observed Markov decision processes (POMDPs) are generalizations of MDPs where…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-03-26 Victor Cohen , Axel Parmentier

We consider finite model approximations of discrete-time partially observed Markov decision processes (POMDPs) under the discounted cost criterion. After converting the original partially observed stochastic control problem to a fully…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2017-10-20 Naci Saldi , Serdar Yüksel , Tamás Linder

We present metrics for measuring state similarity in Markov decision processes (MDPs) with infinitely many states, including MDPs with continuous state spaces. Such metrics provide a stable quantitative analogue of the notion of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2012-07-09 Norman Ferns , Prakash Panangaden , Doina Precup