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Policy optimization is a widely-used method in reinforcement learning. Due to its local-search nature, however, theoretical guarantees on global optimality often rely on extra assumptions on the Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) that bypass…
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…
We study the online estimation of the optimal policy of a Markov decision process (MDP). We propose a class of Stochastic Primal-Dual (SPD) methods which exploit the inherent minimax duality of Bellman equations. The SPD methods update a…
Markov decision processes (MDPs) is viewed as an optimization of an objective function over certain linear operators over general function spaces. A new existence result is established for the existence of optimal policies in general MDPs,…
This paper studies the risk-averse mean-variance optimization in infinite-horizon discounted Markov decision processes (MDPs). The involved variance metric concerns reward variability during the whole process, and future deviations are…
Robust Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) are receiving much attention in learning a robust policy which is less sensitive to environment changes. There are an increasing number of works analyzing sample-efficiency of robust MDPs. However,…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) for constrained MDPs (CMDPs) is an increasingly important problem for various applications. Often, the average criterion is more suitable than the discounted criterion. Yet, RL for average-CMDPs (ACMDPs) remains…
Regularized MDPs serve as a smooth version of original MDPs. However, biased optimal policy always exists for regularized MDPs. Instead of making the coefficient{\lambda}of regularized term sufficiently small, we propose an adaptive…
This note describes sufficient conditions under which total-cost and average-cost Markov decision processes (MDPs) with general state and action spaces, and with weakly continuous transition probabilities, can be reduced to discounted MDPs.…
Markov reward processes (MRPs) are used to model stochastic phenomena arising in operations research, control engineering, robotics, and artificial intelligence, as well as communication and transportation networks. In many of these cases,…
Learning a near optimal policy in a partially observable system remains an elusive challenge in contemporary reinforcement learning. In this work, we consider episodic reinforcement learning in a reward-mixing Markov decision process (MDP).…
Software-intensive systems, such as software product lines and robotics, utilise Markov decision processes (MDPs) to capture uncertainty and analyse sequential decision-making problems. Despite the usefulness of conventional policy…
We present a new algorithm based on posterior sampling for learning in Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDP) in the infinite-horizon undiscounted setting. The algorithm achieves near-optimal regret bounds while being advantageous…
We study countably infinite Markov decision processes (MDPs) with real-valued transition rewards. Every infinite run induces the following sequences of payoffs: 1. Point payoff (the sequence of directly seen transition rewards), 2. Total…
We study model-based reinforcement learning with non-linear function approximation where the transition function of the underlying Markov decision process (MDP) is given by a multinomial logistic (MNL) model. We develop a provably efficient…
We consider model-free reinforcement learning for infinite-horizon discounted Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with a continuous state space and unknown transition kernel, when only a single sample path under an arbitrary policy of the…
We study the tradeoff between sample complexity and round complexity in on-demand sampling, where the learning algorithm adaptively samples from $k$ distributions over a limited number of rounds. In the realizable setting of…
In this paper we design hybrid control policies for hybrid systems whose mathematical models are unknown. Our contributions are threefold. First, we propose a framework for modelling the hybrid control design problem as a single Markov…
A diagnostic policy specifies what test to perform next, based on the results of previous tests, and when to stop and make a diagnosis. Cost-sensitive diagnostic policies perform tradeoffs between (a) the cost of tests and (b) the cost of…
We study a class of infinite-horizon average-cost Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) whose reward and transition structures are nearly separable. For the totally separable baseline (that is, with no perturbation), we derive an explicit…