Related papers: A Single-Loop Robust Policy Gradient Method for Ro…

High-level penetration of intermittent renewable energy sources (RESs) has introduced significant uncertainties into modern power systems. In order to rapidly and economically respond to the fluctuations of power system operating state,…

In this paper, we revisit and improve the convergence of policy gradient (PG), natural PG (NPG) methods, and their variance-reduced variants, under general smooth policy parametrizations. More specifically, with the Fisher information…

We study the problem of learning policies that maximize cumulative reward while satisfying safety constraints, even when the real environment differs from a simulator or nominal model. We focus on robust constrained Markov decision…

A wide variety of queueing systems can be naturally modeled as infinite-state Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). In the reinforcement learning (RL) context, a variety of algorithms have been developed to learn and optimize these MDPs. At the…

We consider a class of (possibly strongly) geodesically convex optimization problems on Hadamard manifolds, where the objective function splits into the sum of a smooth and a possibly nonsmooth function. We introduce an intrinsic convex…

We propose a novel generalization of constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs) that we call the \emph{semi-infinitely constrained Markov decision process} (SICMDP). Particularly, we consider a continuum of constraints instead of a…

Value iteration is a well-known method of solving Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) that is simple to implement and boasts strong theoretical convergence guarantees. However, the computational cost of value iteration quickly becomes…

We consider a setting involving $N$ agents, where each agent interacts with an environment modeled as a Markov Decision Process (MDP). The agents' MDPs differ in their reward functions, capturing heterogeneous objectives/tasks. The…

We propose and study a general framework for regularized Markov decision processes (MDPs) where the goal is to find an optimal policy that maximizes the expected discounted total reward plus a policy regularization term. The extant…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms have shown tremendous success in simulation environments, but their application to real-world problems faces significant challenges, with safety being a major concern. In particular, enforcing…

We introduce a QPLEX Decision Process (QDP) as a model for dynamic control of queueing systems with non-stationary arrivals, general service distributions, and service-level chance constraints. QDPs integrate QPLEX, a computational modeling…

Mixed observable Markov decision processes (MOMDPs) are a modeling framework for autonomous systems described by both fully and partially observable states. In this work, we study the problem of synthesizing a control policy for MOMDPs that…

Risk-sensitive planning aims to identify policies maximizing some tail-focused metrics in Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). Such an optimization task can be very costly for the most widely used and interpretable metrics such as threshold…

Dynamic optimization of mean and variance in Markov decision processes (MDPs) is a long-standing challenge caused by the failure of dynamic programming. In this paper, we propose a new approach to find the globally optimal policy for…

Policy gradient (PG) gives rise to a rich class of reinforcement learning (RL) methods. Recently, there has been an emerging trend to accelerate the existing PG methods such as REINFORCE by the \emph{variance reduction} techniques. However,…

The pursuit of robustness has recently been a popular topic in reinforcement learning (RL) research, yet the existing methods generally suffer from efficiency issues that obstruct their real-world implementation. In this paper, we introduce…

Multi-model Markov decision process (MMDP) is a promising framework for computing policies that are robust to parameter uncertainty in MDPs. MMDPs aim to find a policy that maximizes the expected return over a distribution of MDP models.…

Markov decision processes (MDPs) with large number of states are of high practical interest. However, conventional algorithms to solve MDP are computationally infeasible in this scenario. Approximate dynamic programming (ADP) methods tackle…

This work revisits standard policy gradient methods used on restricted policy classes, which are known to get stuck in suboptimal critical points. We identify an important cause for this phenomenon to be that the policy gradient is itself…

In this paper, we focus on a data-driven risk-averse multistage stochastic programming (RMSP) model considering distributional robustness. We optimize the RMSP over the worst-case distribution within an ambiguity set of probability…