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Standard planners for sequential decision making (including Monte Carlo planning, tree search, dynamic programming, etc.) are constrained by an implicit sequential planning assumption: The order in which a plan is constructed is the same in…

Markov Decision Process (MDP) is the underlying model for optimal planning for decision-theoretic agents in stochastic environments. Although much research focuses on solving MDP problems both in tabular form or using factored…

This paper presents two new approaches to decomposing and solving large Markov decision problems (MDPs), a partial decoupling method and a complete decoupling method. In these approaches, a large, stochastic decision problem is divided into…

Solving Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) remains a central challenge in sequential decision-making, especially when dealing with large state spaces and long-term optimization criteria. A key step in Bellman dynamic programming algorithms is…

Responsibility attribution is a key concept of accountable multi-agent decision making. Given a sequence of actions, responsibility attribution mechanisms quantify the impact of each participating agent to the final outcome. One such…

Recently there have been exciting developments in Monte Carlo methods, with the development of new MCMC and sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) algorithms which are based on continuous-time, rather than discrete-time, Markov processes. This has…

Optimal decision-making under partial observability requires agents to balance reducing uncertainty (exploration) against pursuing immediate objectives (exploitation). In this paper, we introduce a novel policy optimization framework for…

We propose a new class of structured methods for Monte Carlo (MC) sampling, called DPPMC, designed for high-dimensional nonisotropic distributions where samples are correlated to reduce the variance of the estimator via determinantal point…

Solving general Markov decision processes (MDPs) is a computationally hard problem. Solving finite-horizon MDPs, on the other hand, is highly tractable with well known polynomial-time algorithms. What drives this extreme disparity, and do…

In hierarchical planning for Markov decision processes (MDPs), temporal abstraction allows planning with macro-actions that take place at different time scale in form of sequential composition. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to…

We propose and analyze a temporal concatenation heuristic for solving large-scale finite-horizon Markov decision processes (MDP), which divides the MDP into smaller sub-problems along the time horizon and generates an overall solution by…

Markov decision processes (MDPs) are the defacto frame-work for sequential decision making in the presence ofstochastic uncertainty. A classical optimization criterion forMDPs is to maximize the expected discounted-sum pay-off, which…

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…

Factored Markov decision processes (MDPs) are a prominent paradigm within the artificial intelligence community for modeling and solving large-scale MDPs whose rewards and dynamics decompose into smaller, loosely interacting components.…

The Job Shop Scheduling Problem (JSSP) is a well-known optimization problem in manufacturing, where the goal is to determine the optimal sequence of jobs across different machines to minimize a given objective. In this work, we focus on…

We propose MDP-GapE, a new trajectory-based Monte-Carlo Tree Search algorithm for planning in a Markov Decision Process in which transitions have a finite support. We prove an upper bound on the number of calls to the generative models…

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,…

In this paper, we consider planning in stochastic shortest path (SSP) problems, a subclass of Markov Decision Problems (MDP). We focus on medium-size problems whose state space can be fully enumerated. This problem has numerous important…

This paper presents a scalable and fault-tolerant framework for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) mission management in complex and uncertain environments. The proposed approach addresses the computational bottleneck inherent in solving…

A novel class of non-reversible Markov chain Monte Carlo schemes relying on continuous-time piecewise-deterministic Markov Processes has recently emerged. In these algorithms, the state of the Markov process evolves according to a…