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Constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs), in which the agent optimizes expected payoffs while keeping the expected cost below a given threshold, are the leading framework for safe sequential decision making under stochastic…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-12-19 Martin Kurečka , Václav Nevyhoštěný , Petr Novotný , Vít Unčovský

This paper discusses the functional stability of closed-loop Markov Chains under optimal policies resulting from a discounted optimality criterion, forming Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). We investigate the stability of MDPs in the sense…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-04-01 Arash Bahari Kordabad , Sebastien Gros

This paper addresses the problem of planning under uncertainty in large Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). Factored MDPs represent a complex state space using state variables and the transition model using a dynamic Bayesian network. This…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2011-06-10 C. Guestrin , D. Koller , R. Parr , S. Venkataraman

Value decomposition has long been a fundamental technique in multi-agent dynamic programming and reinforcement learning (RL). Specifically, the value function of a global state $(s_1,s_2,\ldots,s_N)$ is often approximated as the sum of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-14 Shuze Chen , Tianyi Peng

We propose a generic Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm to speed up computations for datasets with many observations. A key feature of our approach is the use of the highly efficient difference estimator from the survey sampling…

Methodology · Statistics 2017-08-03 Matias Quiroz , Mattias Villani , Robert Kohn

We cast episodic Markov decision process (MDP) planning as Bayesian inference over policies. A policy is treated as the latent variable and is assigned an unnormalized probability of optimality that is monotone in its expected return,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 David Tolpin

The distributionally robust Markov Decision Process (MDP) approach asks for a distributionally robust policy that achieves the maximal expected total reward under the most adversarial distribution of uncertain parameters. In this paper, we…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2018-10-10 Zhi Chen , Pengqian Yu , William B. Haskell

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a well-established family of algorithms primarily used in Bayesian statistics to sample from a target distribution when direct sampling is challenging. Existing work on Bayesian decision trees uses MCMC.…

Computation · Statistics 2023-01-24 Efthyvoulos Drousiotis , Paul G. Spirakis , Simon Maskell

Markov decision processes (MDP) are useful to model optimisation problems in concurrent systems. To verify MDPs with efficient Monte Carlo techniques requires that their nondeterminism be resolved by a scheduler. Recent work has introduced…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2016-11-15 Pedro D'Argenio , Axel Legay , Sean Sedwards , Louis-Marie Traonouez

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-14 Roshan Shariff , Csaba Szepesvári

First of all, this paper presents some improvements of DSMC method in the form of new schemes and approaches, that, for a wide class of problems, increase performance and reduce the demands on computer resources. The most important…

Fluid Dynamics · Physics 2012-01-16 Roman V. Maltsev

Markov decision processes (MDPs) describe sequential decision-making processes; MDP policies return for every state in that process an advised action. Classical algorithms can efficiently compute policies that are optimal with respect to,…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2025-05-23 Roman Andriushchenko , Milan Češka , Sebastian Junges , Filip Macák

The standard formulation of Markov decision processes (MDPs) assumes that the agent's decisions are executed immediately. However, in numerous realistic applications such as robotics or healthcare, actions are performed with a delay whose…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-04-09 David Valensi , Esther Derman , Shie Mannor , Gal Dalal

We present a scalable tree search planning algorithm for large multi-agent sequential decision problems that require dynamic collaboration. Teams of agents need to coordinate decisions in many domains, but naive approaches fail due to the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-01-14 Shushman Choudhury , Jayesh K. Gupta , Peter Morales , Mykel J. Kochenderfer

Diffusion models have recently emerged as a powerful approach for trajectory planning. However, their inherently non-sequential nature limits their effectiveness in long-horizon reasoning tasks at test time. The recently proposed Monte…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Jaesik Yoon , Hyeonseo Cho , Yoshua Bengio , Sungjin Ahn

We present two new classes of causal models of decision-making agents. Our approach is motivated by the needs of modeling the economics of computing systems. These systems are composed of subsystems and can exhibit endogenous limits on…

Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Sebastian Benthall , Alan Lujan

Recent work has suggested using Monte Carlo methods based on piecewise deterministic Markov processes (PDMPs) to sample from target distributions of interest. PDMPs are non-reversible continuous-time processes endowed with momentum, and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-06-28 Paul Fearnhead , Sebastiano Grazzi , Chris Nemeth , Gareth O. Roberts

Many real-world decision-theoretic planning problems can be naturally modeled with discrete and continuous state Markov decision processes (DC-MDPs). While previous work has addressed automated decision-theoretic planning for DCMDPs,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2012-02-20 Scott Sanner , Karina Valdivia Delgado , Leliane Nunes de Barros

We introduce causal Markov Decision Processes (C-MDPs), a new formalism for sequential decision making which combines the standard MDP formulation with causal structures over state transition and reward functions. Many contemporary and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-02-16 Yangyi Lu , Amirhossein Meisami , Ambuj Tewari

Model-based reinforcement learning (RL) methods that leverage search are responsible for many milestone breakthroughs in RL. Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) recently emerged as an alternative to the Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) algorithm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Yaniv Oren , Joery A. de Vries , Pascal R. van der Vaart , Matthijs T. J. Spaan , Wendelin Böhmer