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A state space representation of an environment is a classic and yet powerful tool used by many autonomous robotic systems for efficient and often optimal solution planning. However, designing these representations with high performance is…

We investigate the problem of optimal control synthesis for Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), addressing both qualitative and quantitative objectives. Specifically, we require the system to satisfy a qualitative task specified by a Linear…

Coordination of distributed agents is required for problems arising in many areas, including multi-robot systems, networking and e-commerce. As a formal framework for such problems, we use the decentralized partially observable Markov…

We present a method for solving implicit (factored) Markov decision processes (MDPs) with very large state spaces. We introduce a property of state space partitions which we call epsilon-homogeneity. Intuitively, an epsilon-homogeneous…

We study a class of sequential decision-making problems with augmented predictions, potentially provided by a machine learning algorithm. In this setting, the decision-maker receives prediction intervals for unknown parameters that become…

We propose two scheduling algorithms that seek to optimize the quality of scalably coded videos that have been stored at a video server before transmission.} The first scheduling algorithm is derived from a Markov Decision Process (MDP)…

This paper is concerned with a compositional approach for constructing both infinite (reduced-order models) and finite abstractions (a.k.a. finite Markov decision processes (MDPs)) of large-scale interconnected discrete-time stochastic…

In this paper, we focus on formal synthesis of control policies for finite Markov decision processes with non-negative real-valued costs. We develop an algorithm to automatically generate a policy that guarantees the satisfaction of a…

We are interested in risk constraints for infinite horizon discrete time Markov decision processes (MDPs). Starting with average reward MDPs, we show that increasing concave stochastic dominance constraints on the empirical distribution of…

In this paper, we consider a modified version of the control problem in a model free Markov decision process (MDP) setting with large state and action spaces. The control problem most commonly addressed in the contemporary literature is to…

A popular approach to solving a decision process with non-Markovian rewards (NMRDP) is to exploit a compact representation of the reward function to automatically translate the NMRDP into an equivalent Markov decision process (MDP) amenable…

We study the online estimation of the optimal policy of a Markov decision process (MDP). We propose a class of Stochastic Primal-Dual (SPD) methods which exploit the inherent minimax duality of Bellman equations. The SPD methods update a…

Solving partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) is highly intractable in general, at least in part because the optimal policy may be infinitely large. In this paper, we explore the problem of finding the optimal policy from…

Many applications -- including power systems, robotics, and economics -- involve a dynamical system interacting with a stochastic and hard-to-model environment. We adopt a reinforcement learning approach to control such systems.…

We study the evaluation of a policy under best- and worst-case perturbations to a Markov decision process (MDP), using transition observations from the original MDP, whether they are generated under the same or a different policy. This is…

We study model-based learning of finite-window policies in tabular partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs). A common approach to learning under partial observability is to approximate unbounded history dependencies using…

We study infinite horizon Markov decision processes (MDPs) with "fast-slow" structure, where some state variables evolve rapidly ("fast states") while others change more gradually ("slow states"). This structure commonly arises in practice…

Current work in explainable reinforcement learning generally produces policies in the form of a decision tree over the state space. Such policies can be used for formal safety verification, agent behavior prediction, and manual inspection…

In this paper, we consider a class of stochastic optimal control problems with risk constraints that are expressed as bounded probabilities of failure for particular initial states. We present here a martingale approach that diffuses a risk…

In nonlinear dynamical systems, tipping refers to a critical transition from one steady state to another, typically catastrophic, steady state, often resulting from a saddle-node bifurcation. Recently, the machine-learning framework of…