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Markov decision processes (MDPs) are standard models for probabilistic systems with non-deterministic behaviours. Mean payoff (or long-run average reward) provides a mathematically elegant formalism to express performance related…

Performance · Computer Science 2017-09-08 Jan Křetínský , Tobias Meggendorfer

In this work, we design quantum algorithms that are more efficient than classical algorithms to solve time-dependent and finite-horizon Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) in two distinct settings: (1) In the exact dynamics setting, where the…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-08-11 Bin Luo , Yuwen Huang , Jonathan Allcock , Xiaojun Lin , Shengyu Zhang , John C. S. Lui

We study value-iteration (VI) algorithms for solving general (a.k.a. multichain) Markov decision processes (MDPs) under the average-reward criterion, a fundamental but theoretically challenging setting. Beyond the difficulties inherent to…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-23 Matthew Zurek , Yudong Chen

This paper studies discounted Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with finite sets of states and actions. Value iteration is one of the major methods for finding optimal policies. For each discount factor, starting from a finite number of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-07-15 Eugene A. Feinberg , Gaojin He

The question of knowing whether the policy Iteration algorithm (PI) for solving Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) has exponential or (strongly) polynomial complexity has attracted much attention in the last 50 years. Recently, Fearnley…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2011-08-19 Romain Hollanders , Jean-Charles Delvenne , Raphaël Jungers

We present a technique for speeding up the convergence of value iteration for partially observable Markov decisions processes (POMDPs). The underlying idea is similar to that behind modified policy iteration for fully observable Markov…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2013-01-30 Nevin Lianwen Zhang , Stephen S. Lee , Weihong Zhang

We consider large-scale Markov decision processes (MDPs) with a risk measure of variability in cost, under the risk-aware MDPs paradigm. Previous studies showed that risk-aware MDPs, based on a minimax approach to handling risk, can be…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2017-05-17 Pengqian Yu , William B. Haskell , Huan Xu

Algorithmic analysis of Markov decision processes (MDP) and stochastic games (SG) in practice relies on value-iteration (VI) algorithms. Since basic VI does not provide guarantees on the precision of the result, variants of VI have been…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-09-18 Muqsit Azeem , Jan Kretinsky , Maximilian Weininger

Two standard models for probabilistic systems are Markov chains (MCs) and Markov decision processes (MDPs). Classic objectives for such probabilistic models for control and planning problems are reachability and stochastic shortest path.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-13 Krishnendu Chatterjee , Mahdi JafariRaviz , Raimundo Saona , Jakub Svoboda

Algorithmic analysis of Markov decision processes (MDP) and stochastic games (SG) in practice relies on value-iteration (VI) algorithms. Since the basic version of VI does not provide guarantees on the precision of the result, variants of…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Muqsit Azeem , Jan Kretinsky , Maximilian Weininger

Policy Iteration (PI) is a classical family of algorithms to compute an optimal policy for any given Markov Decision Problem (MDP). The basic idea in PI is to begin with some initial policy and to repeatedly update the policy to one from an…

Modified policy iteration (MPI) is a dynamic programming algorithm that combines elements of policy iteration and value iteration. The convergence of MPI has been well studied in the context of discounted and average-cost MDPs. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-16 Yashaswini Murthy , Mehrdad Moharrami , R. Srikant

Markov decision processes (MDPs) are the defacto frame-work for sequential decision making in the presence ofstochastic uncertainty. A classical optimization criterion forMDPs is to maximize the expected discounted-sum pay-off, which…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-02-28 Tomas Brazdil , Krishnendu Chatterjee , Petr Novotny , Jiri Vahala

Value iteration is a powerful yet inefficient algorithm for Markov decision processes (MDPs) because it puts the majority of its effort into backing up the entire state space, which turns out to be unnecessary in many cases. In order to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2014-01-17 Peng Dai , Mausam , Daniel Sabby Weld , Judy Goldsmith

Canonical models of Markov decision processes (MDPs) usually consider geometric discounting based on a constant discount factor. While this standard modeling approach has led to many elegant results, some recent studies indicate the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-07-21 Jiarui Gan , Annika Hennes , Rupak Majumdar , Debmalya Mandal , Goran Radanovic

We study the general approach to accelerating the convergence of the most widely used solution method of Markov decision processes with the total expected discounted reward. Inspired by the monotone behavior of the contraction mappings in…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2008-03-28 Oleksandr Shlakhter , Chi-Guhn Lee , Dmitry Khmelev , Nasser Jaber

Markov Decision Processes are classically solved using Value Iteration and Policy Iteration algorithms. Recent interest in Reinforcement Learning has motivated the study of methods inspired by optimization, such as gradient ascent. Among…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-05 Sajad Khodadadian , Prakirt Raj Jhunjhunwala , Sushil Mahavir Varma , Siva Theja Maguluri

In this paper, we consider a Markov decision process (MDP), where the ego agent has a nominal objective to pursue while needs to hide its state from detection by an adversary. After formulating the problem, we first propose a value…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2019-08-22 Nan Li , Ilya Kolmanovsky , Anouck Girard

Interval Markov decision processes are a class of Markov models where the transition probabilities between the states belong to intervals. In this paper, we study the problem of efficient estimation of the optimal policies in Interval…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-09-19 Saber Jafarpour , Samuel Coogan

Value iteration is a fixed point iteration technique utilized to obtain the optimal value function and policy in a discounted reward Markov Decision Process (MDP). Here, a contraction operator is constructed and applied repeatedly to arrive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-21 Chandramouli Kamanchi , Raghuram Bharadwaj Diddigi , Shalabh Bhatnagar