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Markov decision processes are typically used for sequential decision making under uncertainty. For many aspects however, ranging from constrained or safe specifications to various kinds of temporal (non-Markovian) dependencies in task and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-11-10 Nicky Lenaers , Martijn van Otterlo

Markov decision processes (MDP) are useful to model concurrent process optimisation problems, but verifying them with numerical methods is often intractable. Existing approximative approaches do not scale well and are limited to memoryless…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2014-09-18 Axel Legay , Sean Sedwards , Louis-Marie Traonouez

We consider Markov decision processes (MDPs) with unknown disturbance distribution and address this problem using the robust Markov decision process (RMDP) approach. We construct the empirical distribution of the unknown disturbance…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-11 Sivaramakrishnan Ramani

This paper considers a simulation-based estimator for a general class of Markovian processes and explores some strong consistency properties of the estimator. The estimation problem is defined over a continuum of invariant distributions…

Probability · Mathematics 2010-01-14 Manuel S. Santos

Markov decision processes (MDPs) with rewards are a widespread and well-studied model for systems that make both probabilistic and nondeterministic choices. A fundamental result about MDPs is that their minimal and maximal expected rewards…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2024-11-26 Kevin Batz , Benjamin Lucien Kaminski , Christoph Matheja , Tobias Winkler

The problem of selecting the right state-representation in a reinforcement learning problem is considered. Several models (functions mapping past observations to a finite set) of the observations are given, and it is known that for at least…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-02-12 Odalric-Ambrym Maillard , Rémi Munos , Daniil Ryabko

Robust Markov decision processes (MDPs) address the challenge of model uncertainty by optimizing the worst-case performance over an uncertainty set of MDPs. In this paper, we focus on the robust average-reward MDPs under the model-free…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-19 Yue Wang , Alvaro Velasquez , George Atia , Ashley Prater-Bennette , Shaofeng Zou

We develop a qualitative theory of Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) and Partially Observable MDPs that can be used to model sequential decision making tasks when only qualitative information is available. Our approach is based upon an…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2013-01-07 Blai Bonet , Judea Pearl

We introduce synchronizing objectives for Markov decision processes (MDP). Intuitively, a synchronizing objective requires that eventually, at every step there is a state which concentrates almost all the probability mass. In particular, it…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2011-02-22 Laurent Doyen , Thierry Massart , Mahsa Shirmohammadi

We consider the problem of estimating the number of hidden states (the order) of a nonparametric hidden Markov model (HMM). We propose two different methods and prove their almost sure consistency without any prior assumption, be it on the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2017-05-19 Luc Lehéricy

A tenet of reinforcement learning is that the agent always observes rewards. However, this is not true in many realistic settings, e.g., a human observer may not always be available to provide rewards, sensors may be limited or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Alireza Kazemipour , Simone Parisi , Matthew E. Taylor , Michael Bowling

This paper investigates natural conditions for the existence of optimal policies for a Markov decision process with incomplete information (MDPII) and with expected total costs. The MDPII is the classic model of a controlled stochastic…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-09-30 Eugene A. Feinberg , Pavlo O. Kasyanov , Michael Z. Zgurovsky

The synthesis problem for partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) is to compute a policy that satisfies a given specification. Such policies have to take the full execution history of a POMDP into account, rendering the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-07-20 Leonore Winterer , Ralf Wimmer , Nils Jansen , Bernd Becker

We investigate model-based reinforcement learning in contextual Markov decision processes (C-MDPs) in which the context is unobserved and induces confounding in the offline dataset. In such settings, conventional model-learning methods are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Nishanth Venkatesh , Andreas A. Malikopoulos

We present a general framework for applying machine-learning algorithms to the verification of Markov decision processes (MDPs). The primary goal of these techniques is to improve performance by avoiding an exhaustive exploration of the…

Markov decision processes capture sequential decision making under uncertainty, where an agent must choose actions so as to optimize long term reward. The paper studies efficient reasoning mechanisms for Relational Markov Decision Processes…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2011-11-02 Chenggang Wang , Saket Joshi , Roni Khardon

In this paper, we consider solving discounted Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) under the constraint that the resulting policy is stabilizing. In practice MDPs are solved based on some form of policy approximation. We will leverage recent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-03 Mario Zanon , Sébastien Gros , Michele Palladino

Learning a Markov Decision Process (MDP) from a fixed batch of trajectories is a non-trivial task whose outcome's quality depends on both the amount and the diversity of the sampled regions of the state-action space. Yet, many MDPs are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-08 Giorgio Angelotti , Nicolas Drougard , Caroline P. C. Chanel

This paper deals with control of partially observable discrete-time stochastic systems. It introduces and studies Markov Decision Processes with Incomplete Information and with semi-uniform Feller transition probabilities. The important…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-08-30 Eugene A. Feinberg , Pavlo O. Kasyanov , Michael Z. Zgurovsky

Reinforcement learning in non-stationary environments is challenging due to abrupt and unpredictable changes in dynamics, often causing traditional algorithms to fail to converge. However, in many real-world cases, non-stationarity has some…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-25 Mohsen Amiri , Sindri Magnússon