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We study a Q learning algorithm for continuous time stochastic control problems. The proposed algorithm uses the sampled state process by discretizing the state and control action spaces under piece-wise constant control processes. We show…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-03-10 Erhan Bayraktar , Ali Devran Kara

In an episodic Markov Decision Process (MDP) problem, an online algorithm chooses from a set of actions in a sequence of $H$ trials, where $H$ is the episode length, in order to maximize the total payoff of the chosen actions. Q-learning,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-11 Xu Zhu

Markov decision processes (MDPs) are the defacto frame-work for sequential decision making in the presence ofstochastic uncertainty. A classical optimization criterion forMDPs is to maximize the expected discounted-sum pay-off, which…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-02-28 Tomas Brazdil , Krishnendu Chatterjee , Petr Novotny , Jiri Vahala

In this paper, we propose a reinforcement learning algorithm to solve a multi-agent Markov decision process (MMDP). The goal, inspired by Blackwell's Approachability Theorem, is to lower the time average cost of each agent to below a…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-11-22 Keshav P. Keval , Vivek S. Borkar

In this paper, we consider a finite-horizon Markov decision process (MDP) for which the objective at each stage is to minimize a quantile-based risk measure (QBRM) of the sequence of future costs; we call the overall objective a dynamic…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2017-05-10 Daniel R. Jiang , Warren B. Powell

It is common to address the curse of dimensionality in Markov decision processes (MDPs) by exploiting low-rank representations. This motivates much of the recent theoretical study on linear MDPs. However, most approaches require a given…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-09 Tianjun Zhang , Tongzheng Ren , Mengjiao Yang , Joseph E. Gonzalez , Dale Schuurmans , Bo Dai

Time-inhomogeneous finite-horizon Markov decision processes (MDP) are frequently employed to model decision-making in dynamic treatment regimes and other statistical reinforcement learning (RL) scenarios. These fields, especially healthcare…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Elynn Chen , Sai Li , Michael I. Jordan

In this paper, for Markov decision processes (MDPs) with unbounded state spaces we present refined upper bounds presented in [Kara et. al. JMLR'23] on finite model approximation errors via optimizing the quantizers used for finite model…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-15 Osman Bicer , Ali D. Kara , Serdar Yuksel

We study the problem of offline imitation learning in Markov decision processes (MDPs), where the goal is to learn a well-performing policy given a dataset of state-action pairs generated by an expert policy. Complementing a recent line of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-09 Antoine Moulin , Gergely Neu , Luca Viano

We consider online learning for minimizing regret in unknown, episodic Markov decision processes (MDPs) with continuous states and actions. We develop variants of the UCRL and posterior sampling algorithms that employ nonparametric Gaussian…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-04 Sayak Ray Chowdhury , Aditya Gopalan

In the Markov decision process model, policies are usually evaluated by expected cumulative rewards. As this decision criterion is not always suitable, we propose in this paper an algorithm for computing a policy optimal for the quantile…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-12-02 Hugo Gilbert , Paul Weng , Yan Xu

In this work, we design quantum algorithms that are more efficient than classical algorithms to solve time-dependent and finite-horizon Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) in two distinct settings: (1) In the exact dynamics setting, where the…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-08-11 Bin Luo , Yuwen Huang , Jonathan Allcock , Xiaojun Lin , Shengyu Zhang , John C. S. Lui

Asynchronous Q-learning aims to learn the optimal action-value function (or Q-function) of a Markov decision process (MDP), based on a single trajectory of Markovian samples induced by a behavior policy. Focusing on a $\gamma$-discounted…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-13 Gen Li , Yuting Wei , Yuejie Chi , Yuantao Gu , Yuxin Chen

We present BLINQ, a new model-based algorithm that learns the Whittle indices of an indexable, communicating and unichain Markov Decision Process (MDP). Our approach relies on building an empirical estimate of the MDP and then computing its…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-26 Joël Charles-Rebuffé , Nicolas Gast , Bruno Gaujal

Recursion is the fundamental paradigm to finitely describe potentially infinite objects. As state-of-the-art reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms cannot directly reason about recursion, they must rely on the practitioner's ingenuity in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-24 Ernst Moritz Hahn , Mateo Perez , Sven Schewe , Fabio Somenzi , Ashutosh Trivedi , Dominik Wojtczak

Average-reward reinforcement learning offers a principled framework for long-term decision-making by maximizing the mean reward per time step. Although Q-learning is a widely used model-free algorithm with established sample complexity in…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-01-21 Yuchen Jiao , Jiin Woo , Gen Li , Gauri Joshi , Yuejie Chi

We consider Markov decision processes (MDPs) which are a standard model for probabilistic systems. We focus on qualitative properties for MDPs that can express that desired behaviors of the system arise almost-surely (with probability 1) or…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2014-05-06 Krishnendu Chatterjee , Martin Chmelik , Przemyslaw Daca

This work provides a novel interpretation of Markov Decision Processes (MDP) from the online optimization viewpoint. In such an online optimization context, the policy of the MDP is viewed as the decision variable while the corresponding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-29 Tao Li , Guanze Peng , Quanyan Zhu

In the optimization of dynamical systems, the variables typically have constraints. Such problems can be modeled as a constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP). This paper considers a model-free approach to the problem, where the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-02 Qinbo Bai , Vaneet Aggarwal , Ather Gattami

We consider large-scale Markov decision processes (MDPs) with a risk measure of variability in cost, under the risk-aware MDPs paradigm. Previous studies showed that risk-aware MDPs, based on a minimax approach to handling risk, can be…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2017-05-17 Pengqian Yu , William B. Haskell , Huan Xu