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In this paper, we propose a novel reinforcement- learning algorithm consisting in a stochastic variance-reduced version of policy gradient for solving Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). Stochastic variance-reduced gradient (SVRG) methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-06-15 Matteo Papini , Damiano Binaghi , Giuseppe Canonaco , Matteo Pirotta , Marcello Restelli

Value Iteration is a widely used algorithm for solving Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). While previous studies have extensively analyzed its convergence properties, they primarily focus on convergence with respect to the infinity norm. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-06 Arsenii Mustafin , Sebastien Colla , Alex Olshevsky , Ioannis Ch. Paschalidis

Value iteration is a commonly used and empirically competitive method in solving many Markov decision process problems. However, it is known that value iteration has only pseudo-polynomial complexity in general. We establish a somewhat…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2013-01-07 Omid Madani

While there is an extensive body of research on the analysis of Value Iteration (VI) for discounted cumulative-reward MDPs, prior work on analyzing VI for (undiscounted) average-reward MDPs has been limited, and most prior results focus on…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-10 Jongmin Lee , Ernest K. Ryu

We propose a new simple and natural algorithm for learning the optimal Q-value function of a discounted-cost Markov Decision Process (MDP) when the transition kernels are unknown. Unlike the classical learning algorithms for MDPs, such as…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-01-31 Dileep Kalathil , Vivek S. Borkar , Rahul Jain

Processes (MDPs) often require frequent decision making, that is, taking an action every microsecond, second, or minute. Infinite horizon discount reward formulation is still relevant for a large portion of these applications, because…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2014-12-17 Yin-Lam Chow , Junjie Qin

This paper investigates value function approximation in the context of zero-sum Markov games, which can be viewed as a generalization of the Markov decision process (MDP) framework to the two-agent case. We generalize error bounds from MDPs…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2013-01-07 Michail Lagoudakis , Ron Parr

Interval Markov decision processes (IMDPs) generalise classical MDPs by having interval-valued transition probabilities. They provide a powerful modelling tool for probabilistic systems with an additional variation or uncertainty that…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2017-07-07 Ernst Moritz Hahn , Vahid Hashemi , Holger Hermanns , Morteza Lahijanian , Andrea Turrini

Markov decision processes (MDP) are a well-established model for sequential decision-making in the presence of probabilities. In robust MDP (RMDP), every action is associated with an uncertainty set of probability distributions, modelling…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-12-16 Tobias Meggendorfer , Maximilian Weininger , Patrick Wienhöft

Decision-making problems in uncertain or stochastic domains are often formulated as Markov decision processes (MDPs). Policy iteration (PI) is a popular algorithm for searching over policy-space, the size of which is exponential in the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2013-01-30 Yishay Mansour , Satinder Singh

Value iteration (VI) is a foundational dynamic programming method, important for learning and planning in optimal control and reinforcement learning. VI proceeds in batches, where the update to the value of each state must be completed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-29 Tian Tian , Kenny Young , Richard S. Sutton

Safety in stochastic control systems, which are subject to random noise with a known probability distribution, aims to compute policies that satisfy predefined operational constraints with high confidence throughout the uncertain evolution…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-11-12 Saber Omidi , Marek Petrik , Se Young Yoon , Momotaz Begum

We present a novel POMDP planning algorithm called heuristic search value iteration (HSVI).HSVI is an anytime algorithm that returns a policy and a provable bound on its regret with respect to the optimal policy. HSVI gets its power by…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2012-07-19 Trey Smith , Reid Simmons

Value iteration is a fixed point iteration technique utilized to obtain the optimal value function and policy in a discounted reward Markov Decision Process (MDP). Here, a contraction operator is constructed and applied repeatedly to arrive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-21 Chandramouli Kamanchi , Raghuram Bharadwaj Diddigi , Shalabh Bhatnagar

This paper presents a way of solving Markov Decision Processes that combines state abstraction and temporal abstraction. Specifically, we combine state aggregation with the options framework and demonstrate that they work well together and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2015-01-19 Kamil Ciosek , David Silver

Policy Iteration (PI) is a classical family of algorithms to compute an optimal policy for any given Markov Decision Problem (MDP). The basic idea in PI is to begin with some initial policy and to repeatedly update the policy to one from an…

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

Solving partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) typically requires reasoning about the values of exponentially many state beliefs. Towards practical performance, state-of-the-art solvers use value bounds to guide this…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-02-11 Merlijn Krale , Wietze Koops , Sebastian Junges , Thiago D. Simão , Nils Jansen

One of the most widely used methods for solving average cost MDP problems is the value iteration method. This method, however, is often computationally impractical and restricted in size of solvable MDP problems. We propose acceleration…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2008-06-03 Oleksandr Shlakhter , Chi-Guhn Lee

This paper studies the expected value of multiplicative rewards, where rewards obtained in each step are multiplied (instead of the usual addition), in Markov chains (MCs) and Markov decision processes (MDPs). One of the key differences to…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2025-06-24 Christel Baier , Krishnendu Chatterjee , Tobias Meggendorfer , Jakob Piribauer