Related papers: Efficient Risk-sensitive Planning via Entropic Ris…

This paper describes a novel approach to planning which takes advantage of decision theory to greatly improve robustness in an uncertain environment. We present an algorithm which computes conditional plans of maximum expected utility. This…

Markov decision processes (MDPs) are formal models commonly used in sequential decision-making. MDPs capture the stochasticity that may arise, for instance, from imprecise actuators via probabilities in the transition function. However, in…

Motivated by many application problems, we consider Markov decision processes (MDPs) with a general loss function and unknown parameters. To mitigate the epistemic uncertainty associated with unknown parameters, we take a Bayesian approach…

A risk measure that is consistent with the second-order stochastic dominance and additive for sums of independent random variables can be represented as a weighted entropic risk measure (WERM). The expected utility maximization problem with…

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…

The aim of this paper is to investigate risk-averse and distributionally robust modeling of Stochastic Optimal Control (SOC) and Markov Decision Process (MDP). We discuss construction of conditional nested risk functionals, a particular…

Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) offer a fairly generic and powerful framework to discuss the notion of optimal policies for dynamic systems, in particular when the dynamics are stochastic. However, computing the optimal policy of an MDP…

Markov decision processes (MDPs) are a popular model for performance analysis and optimization of stochastic systems. The parameters of stochastic behavior of MDPs are estimates from empirical observations of a system; their values are not…

Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) are a popular class of models suitable for solving control decision problems in probabilistic reactive systems. We consider parametric MDPs (pMDPs) that include parameters in some of the transition…

This dissertation makes three main contributions. First, We identify a new connection between policy gradient and dynamic programming in MMDPs and propose the Coordinate Ascent Dynamic Programming (CADP) algorithm to compute a Markov policy…

Synthesising verifiably correct controllers for dynamical systems is crucial for safety-critical problems. To achieve this, it is important to account for uncertainty in a robust manner, while at the same time it is often of interest to…

This paper shows that the optimal policy and value functions of a Markov Decision Process (MDP), either discounted or not, can be captured by a finite-horizon undiscounted Optimal Control Problem (OCP), even if based on an inexact model.…

We propose policy gradient algorithms which learn risk-sensitive policies in a reinforcement learning (RL) framework. Our proposed algorithms maximize the distortion risk measure (DRM) of the cumulative reward in an episodic Markov decision…

We consider the problem of risk-sensitive motion planning in the presence of randomly moving obstacles. To this end, we adopt a model predictive control (MPC) scheme and pose the obstacle avoidance constraint in the MPC problem as a…

We propose a new method for optimistic planning in infinite-horizon discounted Markov decision processes based on the idea of adding regularization to the updates of an otherwise standard approximate value iteration procedure. This…

In classical Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), action costs and transition probabilities are assumed to be known, although an accurate estimation of these parameters is often not possible in practice. This study addresses MDPs under cost…

This paper concerns discrete-time infinite-horizon stochastic control systems with Borel state and action spaces and universally measurable policies. We study optimization problems on strategic measures induced by the policies in these…

Stochastic optimization problems often involve the expectation in its objective. When risk is incorporated in the problem description as well, then risk measures have to be involved in addition to quantify the acceptable risk, often in the…

Risk management is particularly concerned with extreme events, but analysing these events is often hindered by the scarcity of data, especially in a multivariate context. This data scarcity complicates risk management efforts. Various tools…

Our goal is to compute a policy that guarantees improved return over a baseline policy even when the available MDP model is inaccurate. The inaccurate model may be constructed, for example, by system identification techniques when the true…