Related papers: Combinatorial Selection with Costly Information
Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) have been used to formulate many decision-making problems in science and engineering. The objective is to synthesize the best decision (action selection) policies to maximize expected rewards (minimize…
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…
For marketing, we sometimes need to recommend content for multiple pages in sequence. Different from general sequential decision making process, the use cases have a simpler flow where customers per seeing recommended content on each page…
We consider (stochastic) softmax policy gradient (PG) methods for bandits and tabular Markov decision processes (MDPs). While the PG objective is non-concave, recent research has used the objective's smoothness and gradient domination…
Integrated task and motion planning has emerged as a challenging problem in sequential decision making, where a robot needs to compute high-level strategy and low-level motion plans for solving complex tasks. While high-level strategies…
We study infinite-horizon Discounted Markov Decision Processes (DMDPs) under a generative model. Motivated by the Algorithm with Advice framework Mitzenmacher and Vassilvitskii 2022, we propose a novel framework to investigate how a…
Robust Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) are a powerful framework for modeling sequential decision-making problems with model uncertainty. This paper proposes the first first-order framework for solving robust MDPs. Our algorithm interleaves…
The curse of dimensionality is a widely known issue in reinforcement learning (RL). In the tabular setting where the state space $\mathcal{S}$ and the action space $\mathcal{A}$ are both finite, to obtain a nearly optimal policy with…
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…
A matroid is a notion of independence in combinatorial optimization which is closely related to computational efficiency. In particular, it is well known that the maximum of a constrained modular function can be found greedily if and only…
In this paper we address the problem of decision making within a Markov decision process (MDP) framework where risk and modeling errors are taken into account. Our approach is to minimize a risk-sensitive conditional-value-at-risk (CVaR)…
Many physical systems have underlying safety considerations that require that the policy employed ensures the satisfaction of a set of constraints. The analytical formulation usually takes the form of a Constrained Markov Decision Process…
We consider the budget optimization problem faced by an advertiser participating in repeated sponsored search auctions, seeking to maximize the number of clicks attained under that budget. We cast the budget optimization problem as a Markov…
We formalize the problem of maximizing the mean-payoff value with high probability while satisfying a parity objective in a Markov decision process (MDP) with unknown probabilistic transition function and unknown reward function. Assuming…
The Bayes-Adaptive Markov Decision Process (BAMDP) formalism pursues the Bayes-optimal solution to the exploration-exploitation trade-off in reinforcement learning. As the computation of exact solutions to Bayesian reinforcement-learning…
This paper investigates the optimization problem of an infinite stage discrete time Markov decision process (MDP) with a long-run average metric considering both mean and variance of rewards together. Such performance metric is important…
We study computational and statistical aspects of learning Latent Markov Decision Processes (LMDPs). In this model, the learner interacts with an MDP drawn at the beginning of each epoch from an unknown mixture of MDPs. To sidestep known…
We consider Markov decision processes (MDPs) in which the transition probabilities and rewards belong to an uncertainty set parametrized by a collection of random variables. The probability distributions for these random parameters are…
We study the offline data-driven sequential decision making problem in the framework of Markov decision process (MDP). In order to enhance the generalizability and adaptivity of the learned policy, we propose to evaluate each policy by a…
We consider large-scale Markov decision processes (MDPs) with an unknown cost function and employ stochastic convex optimization tools to address the problem of imitation learning, which consists of learning a policy from a finite set of…