Related papers: State Discretization for Continuous-State MDPs in …
Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) are mathematical models of sequential decision-making under uncertainty that have found applications in healthcare, manufacturing, logistics, and others. In these models, a decision-maker observes the state…
We study a multi-agent mean field type control problem in discrete time where the agents aim to find a socially optimal strategy and where the state and action spaces for the agents are assumed to be continuous. The agents are only weakly…
We consider the problem of controlling a fully specified Markov decision process (MDP), also known as the planning problem, when the state space is very large and calculating the optimal policy is intractable. Instead, we pursue the more…
Recent research in decision theoretic planning has focussed on making the solution of Markov decision processes (MDPs) more feasible. We develop a family of algorithms for structured reachability analysis of MDPs that are suitable when an…
The COVID-19 pandemic has posed a policy making crisis where efforts to slow down or end the pandemic conflict with economic priorities. This paper provides mathematical analysis of optimal disease control policies with idealized…
Many countries have experienced at least two waves of the COVID-19 pandemic. The second wave is far more dangerous as distinct strains appear more harmful to human health, but it stems from the complacency about the first wave. This paper…
Solving partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) is highly intractable in general, at least in part because the optimal policy may be infinitely large. In this paper, we explore the problem of finding the optimal policy from…
Regularization of control policies using entropy can be instrumental in adjusting predictability of real-world systems. Applications benefiting from such approaches range from, e.g., cybersecurity, which aims at maximal unpredictability, to…
Efficient contact tracing and isolation is an effective strategy to control epidemics. It was used effectively during the Ebola epidemic and successfully implemented in several parts of the world during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. An…
The deployment of autonomous systems in safety-critical environments requires control policies that guarantee satisfaction of complex control specifications. These systems are commonly modeled as nonlinear discrete-time stochastic systems.…
We study infinite-horizon robust Markov decision processes (MDPs) on continuous state spaces with structured rectangular ambiguity set. The proposed ambiguity set falls within the convex hull of unknown generating kernels. We utilize the…
The solution convergence of Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) can be accelerated by prioritized sweeping of states ranked by their potential impacts to other states. In this paper, we present new heuristics to speed up the solution…
Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) have been used to formulate many decision-making problems in science and engineering. The objective is to synthesize the best decision (action selection) policies to maximize expected rewards (or minimize…
While several non-pharmacological measures have been implemented for a few months in an effort to slow the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic in the United States, the disease remains a danger in a number of counties as restrictions…
The outbreak of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) is unfolding as a major international crisis whose influence extends to every aspect of our daily lives. Effective testing allows infected individuals to be quarantined, thus reducing the…
We introduce synchronizing objectives for Markov decision processes (MDP). Intuitively, a synchronizing objective requires that eventually, at every step there is a state which concentrates almost all the probability mass. In particular, it…
In many practical sequential decision-making problems, tracking the state of the environment incurs a sensing/communication/computation cost. In these settings, the agent's interaction with its environment includes the additional component…
Stochastic domains often involve risk-averse decision makers. While recent work has focused on how to model risk in Markov decision processes using risk measures, it has not addressed the problem of solving large risk-averse formulations.…
Discrete time control systems whose dynamics and observations are described by stochastic equations are common in engineering, operations research, health care, and economics. For example, stochastic filtering problems are usually defined…
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,…