Related papers: Weighted mesh algorithms for general Markov decisi…
Markov control algorithms that perform smooth, non-greedy updates of the policy have been shown to be very general and versatile, with policy gradient and Expectation Maximisation algorithms being particularly popular. For these algorithms,…
We study the problem of learning policy of an infinite-horizon, discounted cost, Markov decision process (MDP) with a large number of states. We compute the actions of a policy that is nearly as good as a policy chosen by a suitable oracle…
The fixed-horizon constrained Markov Decision Process (C-MDP) is a well-known model for planning in stochastic environments under operating constraints. Chance-Constrained MDP (CC-MDP) is a variant that allows bounding the probability of…
Partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) have recently become popular among many AI researchers because they serve as a natural model for planning under uncertainty. Value iteration is a well-known algorithm for finding…
In this work, we study $\gamma$-discounted infinite-horizon tabular Markov decision processes (MDPs) and introduce a framework called dynamic policy gradient (DynPG). The framework directly integrates dynamic programming with (any) policy…
Finite-horizon Markov decision processes (MDPs) with high-dimensional exogenous uncertainty and endogenous states arise in operations and finance, including the valuation and exercise of Bermudan and real options, but face a scalability…
In many operations management problems, we need to make decisions sequentially to minimize the cost while satisfying certain constraints. One modeling approach to study such problems is constrained Markov decision process (CMDP). When…
We propose novel classical and quantum online algorithms for learning finite-horizon and infinite-horizon average-reward Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). Our algorithms are based on a hybrid exploration-generative reinforcement learning…
This paper investigates infinite-horizon average reward Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs) with general parametrization. We propose a Primal-Dual Natural Actor-Critic algorithm that adeptly manages constraints while ensuring a…
We consider policy evaluation in infinite-horizon discounted Markov decision problems (MDPs) with infinite spaces. We reformulate this task a compositional stochastic program with a function-valued decision variable that belongs to a…
In this paper we investigate the tractability of robust Markov Decision Processes (RMDPs) under various structural assumptions on the uncertainty set. Surprisingly, we show that in all generality (i.e. without any assumption on the…
This paper investigates the limit behavior of Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) made of independent particles evolving in a common environment, when the number of particles goes to infinity. In the finite horizon case or with a discounted…
We consider the maximal reach-avoid probability to a target in finite horizon for semi-Markov decision processes with time-varying obstacles. Since the variance of the obstacle set, the model \eqref{Model} is non-homogeneous. To overcome…
Recent control algorithms for Markov decision processes (MDPs) have been designed using an implicit analogy with well-established optimization algorithms. In this paper, we adopt the quasi-Newton method (QNM) from convex optimization to…
This paper studies the computation of robust deterministic policies for Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) in the Lightning Does Not Strike Twice (LDST) model of Mannor, Mebel and Xu (ICML '12). In this model, designed to provide robustness…
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…
We consider a dynamic programming (DP) approach to approximately solving an infinite-horizon constrained Markov decision process (CMDP) problem with a fixed initial-state for the expected total discounted-reward criterion with a…
Markov decision problems (MDPs) provide the foundations for a number of problems of interest to AI researchers studying automated planning and reinforcement learning. In this paper, we summarize results regarding the complexity of solving…
This work develops a powerful and versatile framework for determining acceptance ratios in Metropolis-Hastings type Markov kernels widely used in statistical sampling problems. Our approach allows us to derive new classes of kernels which…
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…