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In this paper, we consider algorithms to decide the existence of strategies in MDPs for Boolean combinations of objectives. These objectives are omega-regular properties that need to be enforced either surely, almost surely, existentially,…

Markov decision process (MDP) is a decision making framework where a decision maker is interested in maximizing the expected discounted value of a stream of rewards received at future stages at various states which are visited according to…

In robust Markov decision processes (MDPs), the uncertainty in the transition kernel is addressed by finding a policy that optimizes the worst-case performance over an uncertainty set of MDPs. While much of the literature has focused on…

Novel advanced policy gradient (APG) methods, such as Trust Region policy optimization and Proximal policy optimization (PPO), have become the dominant reinforcement learning algorithms because of their ease of implementation and good…

Interval Markov Decision Processes (IMDPs) are finite-state uncertain Markov models, where the transition probabilities belong to intervals. Recently, there has been a surge of research on employing IMDPs as abstractions of stochastic…

This paper analyzes reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms for Markov decision processes (MDPs) under the average-reward criterion. We focus on Q-learning algorithms based on relative value iteration (RVI), which are model-free stochastic…

Iterative numerical algorithms are typically equipped with a stopping criterion, where the iteration process is terminated when some error or misfit measure is deemed to be below a given tolerance. This is a useful setting for comparing…

Decision-making under uncertainty is a crucial ability for autonomous systems. In its most general form, this problem can be formulated as a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP). The solution policy of a POMDP can be…

In many sequential decision-making problems one is interested in minimizing an expected cumulative cost while taking into account \emph{risk}, i.e., increased awareness of events of small probability and high consequences. Accordingly, the…

Approximate linear programming (ALP) is an efficient approach to solving large factored Markov decision processes (MDPs). The main idea of the method is to approximate the optimal value function by a set of basis functions and optimize…

We consider Markov decision processes (MDPs) with multiple limit-average (or mean-payoff) objectives. There exist two different views: (i) the expectation semantics, where the goal is to optimize the expected mean-payoff objective, and (ii)…

We consider the problem: is the optimal expected total reward to reach a goal state in a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) below a given threshold? We tackle this -- generally undecidable -- problem by computing…

Large-scale Markov decision processes (MDPs) require planning algorithms with runtime independent of the number of states of the MDP. We consider the planning problem in MDPs using linear value function approximation with only weak…

A popular perspective in Reinforcement learning (RL) casts the problem as probabilistic inference on a graphical model of the Markov decision process (MDP). The core object of study is the probability of each state-action pair being visited…

Osborne's iteration is a method for balancing $n\times n$ matrices which is widely used in linear algebra packages, as balancing preserves eigenvalues and stabilizes their numeral computation. The iteration can be implemented in any norm…

We develop a stochastic approximation-type algorithm to solve finite state/action, infinite-horizon, risk-aware Markov decision processes. Our algorithm has two loops. The inner loop computes the risk by solving a stochastic saddle-point…

We introduce a novel approach to hierarchical reinforcement learning for Linearly-solvable Markov Decision Processes (LMDPs) in the infinite-horizon average-reward setting. Unlike previous work, our approach allows learning low-level and…

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…

Maximum likelihood estimations for the parameters of extreme value distributions are discussed in this paper using fixed point iteration. The commonly used numerical approach for addressing this problem is the Newton-Raphson approach which…

This paper studies the expected value of multiplicative rewards, where rewards obtained in each step are multiplied (instead of the usual addition), in Markov chains (MCs) and Markov decision processes (MDPs). One of the key differences to…