Related papers: A Bayesian Composite Risk Approach for Stochastic …
Optimization is becoming increasingly common in scientific and engineering domains. Oftentimes, these problems involve various levels of stochasticity or uncertainty in generating proposed solutions. Therefore, optimization in these…
Informed and robust decision making in the face of uncertainty is critical for robots that perform physical tasks alongside people. We formulate this as Bayesian Reinforcement Learning over latent Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). While…
Optimal decision-making under partial observability requires agents to balance reducing uncertainty (exploration) against pursuing immediate objectives (exploitation). In this paper, we introduce a novel policy optimization framework for…
Over the last few years, sampling-based stochastic optimal control (SOC) frameworks have shown impressive performances in reinforcement learning (RL) with applications in robotics. However, such approaches require a large amount of samples…
The distributionally robust Markov Decision Process (MDP) approach asks for a distributionally robust policy that achieves the maximal expected total reward under the most adversarial distribution of uncertain parameters. In this paper, we…
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…
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…
This paper is devoted to proposing a new asymmetric risk-sensitive criterion involving different risk attitudes toward varying risk sources. The criterion can only be defined through the initial value of the minimal solutions of quadratic…
Bayesian optimization (BO) is a popular method for optimizing expensive-to-evaluate black-box functions. BO budgets are typically given in iterations, which implicitly assumes each evaluation has the same cost. In fact, in many BO…
Constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs) model scenarios of sequential decision making with multiple objectives that are increasingly important in many applications. However, the model is often unknown and must be learned online while…
We develop a model-free approach to optimally control stochastic, Markovian systems subject to a reach-avoid constraint. Specifically, the state trajectory must remain within a safe set while reaching a target set within a finite time…
A Budgeted Markov Decision Process (BMDP) is an extension of a Markov Decision Process to critical applications requiring safety constraints. It relies on a notion of risk implemented in the shape of a cost signal constrained to lie below…
Sample-efficient exploration is crucial not only for discovering rewarding experiences but also for adapting to environment changes in a task-agnostic fashion. A principled treatment of the problem of optimal input synthesis for system…
We consider the problem of designing policies for partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) with dynamic coherent risk objectives. Synthesizing risk-averse optimal policies for POMDPs requires infinite memory and thus…
We consider a robust reinforcement learning problem, where a learning agent learns from a simulated training environment. To account for the model mis-specification between this training environment and the real environment due to lack of…
We consider risk-sensitive Markov decision processes (MDPs), where the MDP model is influenced by a parameter which takes values in a compact metric space. We identify sufficient conditions under which small perturbations in the model…
Probabilistic model checking aims to prove whether a Markov decision process (MDP) satisfies a temporal logic specification. The underlying methods rely on an often unrealistic assumption that the MDP is precisely known. Consequently,…
We consider discounted infinite-horizon constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs), where the goal is to find an optimal policy that maximizes the expected cumulative reward while satisfying expected cumulative constraints. Motivated by…
This paper is concerned with a data-driven technique for constructing finite Markov decision processes (MDPs) as finite abstractions of discrete-time stochastic control systems with unknown dynamics while providing formal closeness…
Markov chains are the de facto finite-state model for stochastic dynamical systems, and Markov decision processes (MDPs) extend Markov chains by incorporating non-deterministic behaviors. Given an MDP and rewards on states, a classical…