Related papers: Consistent Order Determination of Markov Decision …

We are interested in understanding stability (almost sure boundedness) of stochastic approximation algorithms (SAs) driven by a `controlled Markov' process. Analyzing this class of algorithms is important, since many reinforcement learning…

Robust Markov decision processes (MDPs) provide a general framework to model decision problems where the system dynamics are changing or only partially known. Efficient methods for some \texttt{sa}-rectangular robust MDPs exist, using its…

We present an algorithm for learning mixtures of Markov chains and Markov decision processes (MDPs) from short unlabeled trajectories. Specifically, our method handles mixtures of Markov chains with optional control input by going through a…

We develop an exhaustive study of Markov decision process (MDP) under mean field interaction both on states and actions in the presence of common noise, and when optimization is performed over open-loop controls on infinite horizon. Such…

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…

Motivated by uncertain parameters encountered in Markov decision processes (MDPs), we study the effect of parameter uncertainty on Bellman operator-based methods. Specifically, we consider a family of MDPs where the cost parameters are from…

Probabilistic Computation Tree Logic (PCTL) is frequently used to formally specify control objectives such as probabilistic reachability and safety. In this work, we focus on model checking PCTL specifications statistically on Markov…

Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) provides a principled and generic framework to model real world sequential decision making processes but yet remains unsolved, especially for high dimensional continuous space and unknown…

We consider controller synthesis for stochastic and partially unknown environments in which safety is essential. Specifically, we abstract the problem as a Markov decision process in which the expected performance is measured using a cost…

The goal of this paper is to analyze distributional Markov Decision Processes as a class of control problems in which the objective is to learn policies that steer the distribution of a cumulative reward toward a prescribed target law,…

Piecewise-deterministic Markov processes (PDMPs) offer a powerful stochastic modeling framework that combines deterministic trajectories with random perturbations at random times. Estimating their local characteristics (particularly the…

We study Markov decision processes (MDPs) with multiple limit-average (or mean-payoff) functions. We consider two different objectives, namely, expectation and satisfaction objectives. Given an MDP with k limit-average functions, in the…

Reinforcement Learning aims at identifying and evaluating efficient control policies from data. In many real-world applications, the learner is not allowed to experiment and cannot gather data in an online manner (this is the case when…

Counterfactuals are widely used in AI to explain how minimal changes to a model's input can lead to a different output. However, established methods for computing counterfactuals typically focus on one-step decision-making, and are not…

Cumulative prospect theory (CPT) is the first theory for decision-making under uncertainty that combines full theoretical soundness and empirically realistic features [P.P. Wakker - Prospect theory: For risk and ambiguity, Page 2]. While…

We investigate the classical active pure exploration problem in Markov Decision Processes, where the agent sequentially selects actions and, from the resulting system trajectory, aims at identifying the best policy as fast as possible. We…

Markov decision processes (MDP) and continuous-time MDP (CTMDP) are the fundamental models for non-deterministic systems with probabilistic uncertainty. Mean payoff (a.k.a. long-run average reward) is one of the most classic objectives…

Offline estimation of the dynamical model of a Markov Decision Process (MDP) is a non-trivial task that greatly depends on the data available in the learning phase. Sometimes the dynamics of the model is invariant with respect to some…

We present the convergence rates of synchronous and asynchronous Q-learning for average-reward Markov decision processes, where the absence of contraction poses a fundamental challenge. Existing non-asymptotic results overcome this…

The standard Markov Decision Process (MDP) formulation hinges on the assumption that an action is executed immediately after it was chosen. However, assuming it is often unrealistic and can lead to catastrophic failures in applications such…