Related papers: Finding good policies in average-reward Markov Dec…
We introduce the Blackwell discount factor for Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). Classical objectives for MDPs include discounted, average, and Blackwell optimality. Many existing approaches to computing average-optimal policies solve for…
Markov decision processes (MDPs) and simple stochastic games (SSGs) provide a rich mathematical framework to study many important problems related to probabilistic systems. MDPs and SSGs with finite-horizon objectives, where the goal is to…
Informed and robust decision making in the face of uncertainty is critical for robots that perform physical tasks alongside people. We formulate this as Bayesian Reinforcement Learning over latent Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). While…
Many dynamic decision problems, such as robotic control, involve a series of tasks, many of which are unknown at training time. Typical approaches for these problems, such as multi-task and meta reinforcement learning, do not generalize…
Markov decision processes (MDPs) are used to model stochastic systems in many applications. Several efficient algorithms to compute optimal policies have been studied in the literature, including value iteration (VI) and policy iteration.…
Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) are an effective way to formally describe many Machine Learning problems. In fact, recently MDPs have also emerged as a powerful framework to model financial trading tasks. For example, financial MDPs can…
Contextual Markov decision processes (CMDPs) describe a class of reinforcement learning problems in which the transition kernels and reward functions can change over time with different MDPs indexed by a context variable. While CMDPs serve…
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…
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…
Markov decision process (MDP) is a decision making framework where a decision maker is interested in maximizing the expected discounted value of a stream of rewards received at future stages at various states which are visited according to…
Constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP) is a natural framework for reinforcement learning tasks with safety constraints, where agents learn a policy that maximizes the long-term reward while satisfying the constraints on the long-term…
In the Markov decision process model, policies are usually evaluated by expected cumulative rewards. As this decision criterion is not always suitable, we propose in this paper an algorithm for computing a policy optimal for the quantile…
We present new algorithms for computing and approximating bisimulation metrics in Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). Bisimulation metrics are an elegant formalism that capture behavioral equivalence between states and provide strong…
We study the multiple-policy evaluation problem where we are given a set of $K$ policies and the goal is to evaluate their performance (expected total reward over a fixed horizon) to an accuracy $\epsilon$ with probability at least…
Large-scale Markov decision processes (MDPs) require planning algorithms with runtime independent of the number of states of the MDP. We consider the planning problem in MDPs using linear value function approximation with only weak…
Motivated by many application problems, we consider Markov decision processes (MDPs) with a general loss function and unknown parameters. To mitigate the epistemic uncertainty associated with unknown parameters, we take a Bayesian approach…
Markov Decision Process (MDP) presents a mathematical framework to formulate the learning processes of agents in reinforcement learning. MDP is limited by the Markovian assumption that a reward only depends on the immediate state and…
Decision-making under distribution shift is a central challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), where training and deployment environments differ. We study this problem through the lens of robust Markov decision processes (RMDPs), which…
We address the challenge of quantifying Bayesian uncertainty and incorporating it in offline use cases of finite-state Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with unknown dynamics. Our approach provides a principled method to disentangle…
Policy Mirror Descent (PMD) is a general family of algorithms that covers a wide range of novel and fundamental methods in reinforcement learning. Motivated by the instability of policy iteration (PI) with inexact policy evaluation, PMD…