Related papers: Accelerating Point-Based Value Iteration via Activ…

In order to improve the performance of Bayesian optimisation, we develop a modified Gaussian process upper confidence bound (GP-UCB) acquisition function. This is done by sampling the exploration-exploitation trade-off parameter from a…

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.…

Recently discovered polyhedral structures of the value function for finite state-action discounted Markov decision processes (MDP) shed light on understanding the success of reinforcement learning. We investigate the value function polytope…

We consider reinforcement learning for continuous-time Markov decision processes (MDPs) in the infinite-horizon, average-reward setting. In contrast to discrete-time MDPs, a continuous-time process moves to a state and stays there for a…

This paper addresses the problem of optimal control of robotic sensing systems aimed at autonomous information gathering in scenarios such as environmental monitoring, search and rescue, and surveillance and reconnaissance. The information…

This paper studies an accelerated fitted value iteration (FVI) algorithm to solve high-dimensional Markov decision processes (MDPs). FVI is an approximate dynamic programming algorithm that has desirable theoretical properties. However, it…

Markov decision processes (MDPs) are standard models for probabilistic systems with non-deterministic behaviours. Long-run average rewards provide a mathematically elegant formalism for expressing long term performance. Value iteration (VI)…

Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) are a powerful framework for planning under uncertainty. They allow to model state uncertainty as a belief probability distribution. Approximate solvers based on Monte Carlo sampling…

A recent theoretical analysis of a Monte-Carlo tree search (MCTS) method properly modified from the ``upper confidence bound applied to trees" (UCT) algorithm established a surprising result, due to a great deal of empirical successes…

Stochastic programming is often challenged by epistemic uncertainty, where critical probability distributions are poorly characterized or unknown due to a lack of data. To address this, we pioneer a novel framework for stochastic…

Gaussian process upper confidence bound (GP-UCB) is widely used for sequential optimization of expensive black-box functions. Although many upper bounds on its cumulative regret have been established in the literature, whether GP-UCB is…

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…

Gaussian Processes (GPs) are powerful kernelized methods for non-parameteric regression used in many applications. However, their use is limited to a few thousand of training samples due to their cubic time complexity. In order to scale GPs…

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…

Many applications require optimizing an unknown, noisy function that is expensive to evaluate. We formalize this task as a multi-armed bandit problem, where the payoff function is either sampled from a Gaussian process (GP) or has low RKHS…

Bayesian optimization based on the Gaussian process upper confidence bound (GP-UCB) offers a theoretical guarantee for optimizing black-box functions. In practice, however, black-box functions often involve input uncertainty. To handle such…

A standard objective in partially-observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) is to find a policy that maximizes the expected discounted-sum payoff. However, such policies may still permit unlikely but highly undesirable outcomes, which…

We study the noise-free Gaussian Process (GP) bandits problem, in which the learner seeks to minimize regret through noise-free observations of the black-box objective function lying on the known reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS).…

Autonomous agents that operate in the real world must often deal with partial observability, which is commonly modeled as partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs). However, traditional POMDP models rely on the assumption of…

We propose a fast algorithm for the probabilistic solution of boundary value problems (BVPs), which are ordinary differential equations subject to boundary conditions. In contrast to previous work, we introduce a Gauss--Markov prior and…