Related papers: MDPs with a State Sensing Cost
We consider a finite number of $N$ statistically equal agents, each moving on a finite set of states according to a continuous-time Markov Decision Process (MDP). Transition intensities of the agents and generated rewards depend not only on…
In many practical applications, decision-making processes must balance the costs of acquiring information with the benefits it provides. Traditional control systems often assume full observability, an unrealistic assumption when…
We consider controller synthesis for stochastic and partially unknown environments in which safety is essential. Specifically, we abstract the problem as a Markov decision process in which the expected performance is measured using a cost…
In this paper, we consider a modified version of the control problem in a model free Markov decision process (MDP) setting with large state and action spaces. The control problem most commonly addressed in the contemporary literature is to…
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…
In this paper, we study Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with self-triggered strategies, where the idea of self-triggered control is extended to more generic MDP models. This extension broadens the application of self-triggering policies to…
This paper studies convergence properties of optimal values and actions for discounted and average-cost Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with weakly continuous transition probabilities and applies these properties to the stochastic…
We consider synthesis of control policies that maximize the probability of satisfying given temporal logic specifications in unknown, stochastic environments. We model the interaction between the system and its environment as a Markov…
We investigate the problems of model estimation and reward-free learning in episodic Block MDPs. In these MDPs, the decision maker has access to rich observations or contexts generated from a small number of latent states. We are first…
This note describes sufficient conditions under which total-cost and average-cost Markov decision processes (MDPs) with general state and action spaces, and with weakly continuous transition probabilities, can be reduced to discounted MDPs.…
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 (minimize…
Decision-making problems in uncertain or stochastic domains are often formulated as Markov decision processes (MDPs). Policy iteration (PI) is a popular algorithm for searching over policy-space, the size of which is exponential in the…
In safe MDP planning, a cost function based on the current state and action is often used to specify safety aspects. In the real world, often the state representation used may lack sufficient fidelity to specify such safety constraints.…
This paper investigates the limit behavior of Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) made of independent particles evolving in a common environment, when the number of particles goes to infinity. In the finite horizon case or with a discounted…
In this paper, we show how a simulated Markov decision process (MDP) built by the so-called \emph{baseline} policies, can be used to compute a different policy, namely the \emph{simulated optimal} policy, for which the performance of this…
In cyber-physical systems such as automobiles, measurement data from sensor nodes should be delivered to other consumer nodes such as actuators in a regular fashion. But, in practical systems over unreliable media such as wireless, it is a…
We study infinite horizon Markov decision processes (MDPs) with "fast-slow" structure, where some state variables evolve rapidly ("fast states") while others change more gradually ("slow states"). This structure commonly arises in practice…
In crowd labeling, a large amount of unlabeled data instances are outsourced to a crowd of workers. Workers will be paid for each label they provide, but the labeling requester usually has only a limited amount of the budget. Since data…
In this semi-tutorial paper, we first review the information-theoretic approach to account for the computational costs incurred during the search for optimal actions in a sequential decision-making problem. The traditional (MDP) framework…
We consider partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) with a set of target states and every transition is associated with an integer cost. The optimization objective we study asks to minimize the expected total cost till the…