Related papers: Semismooth Newton Methods for Risk-Averse Markov D…
Markov automata combine non-determinism, probabilistic branching, and exponentially distributed delays. This compositional variant of continuous-time Markov decision processes is used in reliability engineering, performance evaluation and…
Support vector machine is an important and fundamental technique in machine learning. In this paper, we apply a semismooth Newton method to solve two typical SVM models: the L2-loss SVC model and the \epsilon-L2-loss SVR model. The…
We consider the efficient minimization of a nonlinear, strictly convex functional with $\ell_1$-penalty term. Such minimization problems appear in a wide range of applications like Tikhonov regularization of (non)linear inverse problems…
We consider the maximal reach-avoid probability to a target in finite horizon for semi-Markov decision processes with time-varying obstacles. Since the variance of the obstacle set, the model \eqref{Model} is non-homogeneous. To overcome…
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 consider the problem of optimally designing a system for repeated use under uncertainty. We develop a modeling framework that integrates design and operational phases, which are represented by a mixed-integer program and discounted-cost…
We consider finite horizon Markov decision processes under performance measures that involve both the mean and the variance of the cumulative reward. We show that either randomized or history-based policies can improve performance. We prove…
Safe reinforcement learning has been a promising approach for optimizing the policy of an agent that operates in safety-critical applications. In this paper, we propose an algorithm, SNO-MDP, that explores and optimizes Markov decision…
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…
Newton's method is a fundamental technique in optimization with quadratic convergence within a neighborhood around the optimum. However reaching this neighborhood is often slow and dominates the computational costs. We exploit two…
We study infinite-horizon robust Markov decision processes (MDPs) on continuous state spaces with structured rectangular ambiguity set. The proposed ambiguity set falls within the convex hull of unknown generating kernels. We utilize the…
We develop a novel, fundamental and surprisingly simple randomized iterative method for solving consistent linear systems. Our method has six different but equivalent interpretations: sketch-and-project, constrain-and-approximate, random…
We formulate a probabilistic Markov property in discrete time under a dynamic risk framework with minimal assumptions. This is useful for recursive solutions to risk-sensitive versions of dynamic optimisation problems such as optimal…
We introduce a class of models for multidimensional control problems which we call skip-free Markov decision processes on trees. We describe and analyse an algorithm applicable to Markov decision processes of this type that are skip-free in…
We present a data-driven approach for producing policies that are provably robust across unknown stochastic environments. Existing approaches can learn models of a single environment as an interval Markov decision processes (IMDP) and…
At the heart of Newton based optimization methods is a sequence of symmetric linear systems. Each consecutive system in this sequence is similar to the next, so solving them separately is a waste of computational effort. Here we describe…
Recent empirical and theoretical analyses of several commonly used prediction procedures reveal a peculiar risk behavior in high dimensions, referred to as double/multiple descent, in which the asymptotic risk is a non-monotonic function of…
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 (or minimize…
Sequential decisions in volatile, high-stakes settings require more than maximizing expected return; they require principled uncertainty management. This paper presents the Uncertainty-Aware Markov Decision Process (UAMDP), a unified…
We propose a novel trust region method for solving a class of nonsmooth, nonconvex composite-type optimization problems. The approach embeds inexact semismooth Newton steps for finding zeros of a normal map-based stationarity measure for…