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Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) are a mathematical framework for modeling sequential decision making under uncertainty. The classical approaches for solving MDPs are well known and have been widely studied, some of which rely on…
We propose a method of approximating multivariate Gaussian probabilities using dynamic programming. We show that solving the optimization problem associated with a class of discrete-time finite horizon Markov decision processes with…
We present a unified framework based on primal-dual stochastic mirror descent for approximately solving infinite-horizon Markov decision processes (MDPs) given a generative model. When applied to an average-reward MDP with $A_{tot}$ total…
Keeping risk under control is often more crucial than maximizing expected rewards in real-world decision-making situations, such as finance, robotics, autonomous driving, etc. The most natural choice of risk measures is variance, which…
It was recently shown that dynamic programming (DP) methods for finding static CVaR-optimal policies in Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) can fail when based on the dual formulation, yet the root cause of this failure remains unclear. We…
We study infinite-horizon Markov decision processes (MDPs) where the decision maker evaluates each of her strategies by aggregating the infinite stream of expected stage-rewards. The crucial feature of our approach is that the aggregation…
We consider an auto-scaling technique in a cloud system where virtual machines hosted on a physical node are turned on and off depending on the queue's occupation (or thresholds), in order to minimise a global cost integrating both energy…
In scenarios where multiple decision-makers operate within a common decision space, each focusing on their own multi-objective optimization problem (e.g., bargaining games), the problem can be modeled as a multi-party multi-objective…
Sequential decisions in volatile, high-stakes settings require more than maximizing expected return; they require principled uncertainty management. This paper presents the Uncertainty-Aware Markov Decision Process (UAMDP), a unified…
This paper presents a scalable and fault-tolerant framework for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) mission management in complex and uncertain environments. The proposed approach addresses the computational bottleneck inherent in solving…
We study the offline data-driven sequential decision making problem in the framework of Markov decision process (MDP). In order to enhance the generalizability and adaptivity of the learned policy, we propose to evaluate each policy by a…
This paper studies the problem of data collection for policy evaluation in Markov decision processes (MDPs). In policy evaluation, we are given a target policy and asked to estimate the expected cumulative reward it will obtain in an…
Bayesian approaches developed to solve the optimal design of sequential experiments are mathematically elegant but computationally challenging. Recently, techniques using amortization have been proposed to make these Bayesian approaches…
We tackle the general differentiable meta learning problem that is ubiquitous in modern deep learning, including hyperparameter optimization, loss function learning, few-shot learning, invariance learning and more. These problems are often…
This paper studies the computation of robust deterministic policies for Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) in the Lightning Does Not Strike Twice (LDST) model of Mannor, Mebel and Xu (ICML '12). In this model, designed to provide robustness…
In this paper we address the problem of decision making within a Markov decision process (MDP) framework where risk and modeling errors are taken into account. Our approach is to minimize a risk-sensitive conditional-value-at-risk (CVaR)…
We study the policy testing problem in discounted Markov decision processes (MDPs) in the fixed-confidence setting under a generative model with static sampling. The goal is to decide whether the value of a given policy exceeds a specified…
In this paper, we propose an approximate dynamic programming (ADP) algorithm to solve a Markov decision process (MDP) formulation for the admission control of elective patients. To manage the elective patients from multiple specialties…
In most common settings of Markov Decision Process (MDP), an agent evaluate a policy based on expectation of (discounted) sum of rewards. However in many applications this criterion might not be suitable from two perspective: first, in risk…
This paper studies a finite-horizon Markov decision problem with information-theoretic constraints, where the goal is to minimize directed information from the controlled source process to the control process, subject to stage-wise cost…