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A tenet of reinforcement learning is that the agent always observes rewards. However, this is not true in many realistic settings, e.g., a human observer may not always be available to provide rewards, sensors may be limited or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Alireza Kazemipour , Simone Parisi , Matthew E. Taylor , Michael Bowling

The solution convergence of Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) can be accelerated by prioritized sweeping of states ranked by their potential impacts to other states. In this paper, we present new heuristics to speed up the solution…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-01-07 Shoubhik Debnath , Lantao Liu , Gaurav Sukhatme

Differentiable planning promises end-to-end differentiability and adaptivity. However, an issue prevents it from scaling up to larger-scale problems: they need to differentiate through forward iteration layers to compute gradients, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-02 Linfeng Zhao , Huazhe Xu , Lawson L. S. Wong

We propose and analyze a temporal concatenation heuristic for solving large-scale finite-horizon Markov decision processes (MDP), which divides the MDP into smaller sub-problems along the time horizon and generates an overall solution by…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-06-22 Ruiyang Song , Kuang Xu

Markov decision processes (MDP) are a well-established model for sequential decision-making in the presence of probabilities. In robust MDP (RMDP), every action is associated with an uncertainty set of probability distributions, modelling…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-12-16 Tobias Meggendorfer , Maximilian Weininger , Patrick Wienhöft

Caching and multicasting at base stations are two promising approaches to support massive content delivery over wireless networks. However, existing scheduling designs do not make full use of the advantages of the two approaches. In this…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2016-02-25 Bo Zhou , Ying Cui , Meixia Tao

The problem of constrained Markov decision process (CMDP) is investigated, where an agent aims to maximize the expected accumulated discounted reward subject to multiple constraints on its utilities/costs. A new primal-dual approach is…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-10-22 Tianjiao Li , Ziwei Guan , Shaofeng Zou , Tengyu Xu , Yingbin Liang , Guanghui Lan

Optimal queueing control of multi-hop networks remains a challenging problem even in the simplest scenarios. In this paper, we consider a two-hop half-duplex relaying system with random channel connectivity. The relay is equipped with a…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2015-10-28 Bo Zhou , Ying Cui , Meixia Tao

Factored Markov decision processes (MDPs) are a prominent paradigm within the artificial intelligence community for modeling and solving large-scale MDPs whose rewards and dynamics decompose into smaller, loosely interacting components.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-04-03 Huikang Liu , Wolfram Wiesemann , Man-Chung Yue

We consider a class of infinite-dimensional optimization problems in which a distributed vector-valued variable should pointwise almost everywhere take values from a given finite set $\mathcal{M}\subset\mathbb{R}^m$. Such hybrid…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-11-09 Christian Clason , Carla Tameling , Benedikt Wirth

Discrete time stochastic optimal control problems and Markov decision processes (MDPs) are fundamental models for sequential decision-making under uncertainty and as such provide the mathematical framework underlying reinforcement learning…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-07-01 Arnulf Jentzen , Konrad Kleinberg , Thomas Kruse

This paper presents an efficient procedure for multi-objective model checking of long-run average reward (aka: mean pay-off) and total reward objectives as well as their combination. We consider this for Markov automata, a compositional…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2021-01-08 Tim Quatmann , Joost-Pieter Katoen

We introduce learning and planning algorithms for average-reward MDPs, including 1) the first general proven-convergent off-policy model-free control algorithm without reference states, 2) the first proven-convergent off-policy model-free…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-29 Yi Wan , Abhishek Naik , Richard S. Sutton

We study existence and uniqueness of the fixed points solutions of a large class of non-linear variable discounted transfer operators associated to a sequential decision-making process. We establish regularity properties of these solutions,…

Dynamical Systems · Mathematics 2019-02-20 L. Cioletti , Elismar R. Oliveira

We show two average-reward off-policy control algorithms, Differential Q-learning (Wan, Naik, & Sutton 2021a) and RVI Q-learning (Abounadi Bertsekas & Borkar 2001), converge in weakly communicating MDPs. Weakly communicating MDPs are the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-08 Yi Wan , Richard S. Sutton

We formalize the problem of maximizing the mean-payoff value with high probability while satisfying a parity objective in a Markov decision process (MDP) with unknown probabilistic transition function and unknown reward function. Assuming…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-08-24 Jan Křetínský , Guillermo A. Pérez , Jean-François Raskin

In Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with intermittent state information, decision-making becomes challenging due to periods of missing observations. Linear programming (LP) methods can play a crucial role in solving MDPs, in particular,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-09-09 Konstantin Avrachenkov , Madhu Dhiman , Veeraruna Kavitha

A new mechanism for efficiently solving the Markov decision processes (MDPs) is proposed in this paper. We introduce the notion of reachability landscape where we use the Mean First Passage Time (MFPT) as a means to characterize the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-01-10 Shoubhik Debnath , Lantao Liu , Gaurav Sukhatme

Computing optimal conditional reachability probabilities in Markov decision processes (MDPs) is tractable by a reduction to reachability probabilities. Yet, this reduction yields cyclic, challenging MDPs that are often notoriously hard to…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Milan Češka , Sebastian Junges , Luko van der Maas , Filip Macák , Tim Quatmann

In this paper, we first propose a general inertial proximal point method for the mixed variational inequality (VI) problem. Based on our knowledge, without stronger assumptions, convergence rate result is not known in the literature for…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2014-08-04 Caihua Chen , Shiqian Ma , Junfeng Yang