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Markov decision processes (MDPs) are a popular model for performance analysis and optimization of stochastic systems. The parameters of stochastic behavior of MDPs are estimates from empirical observations of a system; their values are not…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-10-26 Dimitri Scheftelowitsch , Peter Buchholz , Vahid Hashemi , Holger Hermanns

Markov decisions processes (MDPs) are becoming increasing popular as models of decision theoretic planning. While traditional dynamic programming methods perform well for problems with small state spaces, structured methods are needed for…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2013-01-30 Jesse Hoey , Robert St-Aubin , Alan Hu , Craig Boutilier

Markov decision problems (MDPs) provide the foundations for a number of problems of interest to AI researchers studying automated planning and reinforcement learning. In this paper, we summarize results regarding the complexity of solving…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2013-02-21 Michael L. Littman , Thomas L. Dean , Leslie Pack Kaelbling

Multi-objective verification problems of parametric Markov decision processes under optimality criteria can be naturally expressed as nonlinear programs. We observe that many of these computationally demanding problems belong to the…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2017-02-02 Murat Cubuktepe , Nils Jansen , Sebastian Junges , Joost-Pieter Katoen , Ivan Papusha , Hasan A. Poonawala , Ufuk Topcu

Similar to the role of Markov decision processes in reinforcement learning, Stochastic Games (SGs) lay the foundation for the study of multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) and sequential agent interactions. In this paper, we derive…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-01-12 Xiaotie Deng , Ningyuan Li , David Mguni , Jun Wang , Yaodong Yang

The stochastic volatility inspired (SVI) model is widely used to fit the implied variance smile. Presently, most optimizer algorithms for the SVI model have a strong dependence on the input starting point. In this study, we develop an…

Mathematical Finance · Quantitative Finance 2023-01-20 Shuzhen Yang , Wenqing Zhang

Monotone variational inequalities (VIs) provide a unifying framework for convex minimization, equilibrium computation, and convex-concave saddle-point problems. Extragradient-type methods are among the most effective first-order algorithms…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-16 Lingqing Shen , Fatma Kılınç-Karzan

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 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

General purpose intelligent learning agents cycle through (complex,non-MDP) sequences of observations, actions, and rewards. On the other hand, reinforcement learning is well-developed for small finite state Markov Decision Processes…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2009-12-30 Marcus Hutter

Variational inference (VI) is a method to approximate the computationally intractable posterior distributions that arise in Bayesian statistics. Typically, VI fits a simple parametric distribution to the target posterior by minimizing an…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-07-18 Chirag Modi , Charles Margossian , Yuling Yao , Robert Gower , David Blei , Lawrence Saul

The aim of this paper is to investigate risk-averse and distributionally robust modeling of Stochastic Optimal Control (SOC) and Markov Decision Process (MDP). We discuss construction of conditional nested risk functionals, a particular…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-05-23 Alexander Shapiro , Yan Li

Training language models to produce both correct answers and sound reasoning remains an open challenge. Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards typically optimizes only final outcomes, which can lead to a failure mode where task…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Kyuyoung Kim , Kevin Wang , Yunfei Xie , Peiyang Xu , Peiyao Sheng , Chen Wei , Zhangyang Wang , Jinwoo Shin , Pramod Viswanath , Sewoong Oh

Solving Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) is a recurrent task in engineering. Even though it is known that solutions for minimizing the infinite horizon expected reward can be found in polynomial time using Linear Programming techniques,…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2014-10-29 Romain Hollanders , Balázs Gerencsér , Jean-Charles Delvenne , Raphaël M. Jungers

In this paper, we present IntervalMDP.jl, a Julia package for probabilistic analysis of interval Markov Decision Processes (IMDPs). IntervalMDP.jl facilitates the synthesis of optimal strategies and verification of IMDPs against…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-04-30 Frederik Baymler Mathiesen , Morteza Lahijanian , Luca Laurenti

Variance reduction techniques such as SPIDER/SARAH/STORM have been extensively studied to improve the convergence rates of stochastic non-convex optimization, which usually maintain and update a sequence of estimators for a single function…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-02 Wei Jiang , Gang Li , Yibo Wang , Lijun Zhang , Tianbao Yang

Adaptive optimal control using value iteration (VI) initiated from a stabilizing policy is theoretically analyzed in various aspects including the continuity of the result, the stability of the system operated using any single/constant…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2015-05-18 Ali Heydari

Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) are a mathematical framework for modeling sequential decision making under uncertainty. The classical approaches for solving MDPs are well known and have been widely studied, some of which rely on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-05-18 Joshua R. Bertram , Xuxi Yang , Peng Wei

We consider controller synthesis for stochastic and partially unknown environments in which safety is essential. Specifically, we abstract the problem as a Markov decision process in which the expected performance is measured using a cost…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2015-10-21 Sebastian Junges , Nils Jansen , Christian Dehnert , Ufuk Topcu , Joost-Pieter Katoen

Safe Policy Improvement (SPI) aims at provable guarantees that a learned policy is at least approximately as good as a given baseline policy. Building on SPI with Soft Baseline Bootstrapping (Soft-SPIBB) by Nadjahi et al., we identify…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-02 Philipp Scholl , Felix Dietrich , Clemens Otte , Steffen Udluft