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Maze navigation is a fundamental challenge in robotics, requiring agents to traverse complex environments efficiently. While the Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) algorithm excels in control tasks, its performance in maze navigation…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-08-08 Wenjie Hu , Ye Zhou , Hann Woei Ho

What are the functionals of the reward that can be computed and optimized exactly in Markov Decision Processes?In the finite-horizon, undiscounted setting, Dynamic Programming (DP) can only handle these operations efficiently for certain…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-02-20 Alexandre Marthe , Aurélien Garivier , Claire Vernade

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

Policy gradient (PG) methods are successful approaches to deal with continuous reinforcement learning (RL) problems. They learn stochastic parametric (hyper)policies by either exploring in the space of actions or in the space of parameters.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-31 Alessandro Montenegro , Marco Mussi , Alberto Maria Metelli , Matteo Papini

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-01 Alexandros Evangelidis , Gricel Vázquez , Simos Gerasimou

We present a framework to address a class of sequential decision making problems. Our framework features learning the optimal control policy with robustness to noisy data, determining the unknown state and action parameters, and performing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-20 Amber Srivastava , Srinivasa M Salapaka

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

We consider the infinite-horizon discounted optimal control problem formalized by Markov Decision Processes. We focus on several approximate variations of the Policy Iteration algorithm: Approximate Policy Iteration, Conservative Policy…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2014-05-13 Bruno Scherrer

This paper considers the problem of finding near-optimal Markovian randomized (MR) policies for finite-state-action, infinite-horizon, constrained risk-sensitive Markov decision processes (CRSMDPs). Constraints are in the form of standard…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-03-14 Uday Kumar M , Sanjay P Bhat , Veeraruna Kavitha , Nandyala Hemachandra

Most reinforcement learning methods are based upon the key assumption that the transition dynamics and reward functions are fixed, that is, the underlying Markov decision process is stationary. However, in many real-world applications, this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-23 Yash Chandak , Georgios Theocharous , Shiv Shankar , Martha White , Sridhar Mahadevan , Philip S. Thomas

Multi-model Markov decision process (MMDP) is a promising framework for computing policies that are robust to parameter uncertainty in MDPs. MMDPs aim to find a policy that maximizes the expected return over a distribution of MDP models.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-15 Xihong Su , Marek Petrik

Interval Markov decision processes are a class of Markov models where the transition probabilities between the states belong to intervals. In this paper, we study the problem of efficient estimation of the optimal policies in Interval…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-09-19 Saber Jafarpour , Samuel Coogan

Discrete time stochastic optimal control problems and Markov decision processes (MDPs), respectively, serve as fundamental models for problems that involve sequential decision making under uncertainty and as such constitute the theoretical…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-03-08 Christian Beck , Arnulf Jentzen , Konrad Kleinberg , Thomas Kruse

Policy mirror descent (PMD) is a general policy optimization framework in reinforcement learning, which can cover a wide range of typical policy optimization methods by specifying different mirror maps. Existing analysis of PMD requires…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-09-24 Jiacai Liu , Wenye Li , Ke Wei

This paper studies discounted Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with finite sets of states and actions. Value iteration is one of the major methods for finding optimal policies. For each discount factor, starting from a finite number of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-07-15 Eugene A. Feinberg , Gaojin He

We consider the problem of constrained Markov decision process (CMDP) in continuous state-actions spaces where the goal is to maximize the expected cumulative reward subject to some constraints. We propose a novel Conservative Natural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-20 Qinbo Bai , Amrit Singh Bedi , Vaneet Aggarwal

We study the convergence of several natural policy gradient (NPG) methods in infinite-horizon discounted Markov decision processes with regular policy parametrizations. For a variety of NPGs and reward functions we show that the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-02-21 Johannes Müller , Guido Montúfar

We propose a novel policy gradient method for multi-agent reinforcement learning, which leverages two different variance-reduction techniques and does not require large batches over iterations. Specifically, we propose a momentum-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-07 Zhanhong Jiang , Xian Yeow Lee , Sin Yong Tan , Kai Liang Tan , Aditya Balu , Young M. Lee , Chinmay Hegde , Soumik Sarkar

In many scientific and engineering problems, noise and nonlinearity are unavoidable, which could induce interesting mathematical problem such as transition phenomena. This paper focuses on efficiently discovering the most probable…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-06-08 Jin Guo , Ting Gao , Peng Zhang , Jiequn Han , Jinqiao Duan

Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs) formalize sequential decision-making problems whose objective is to minimize a cost function while satisfying constraints on various cost functions. In this paper, we consider the setting of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-25 Krishna C. Kalagarla , Rahul Jain , Pierluigi Nuzzo