Related papers: Efficient Computation of Blackwell Optimal Policie…
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…
We propose an algorithm for deterministic continuous Markov Decision Processes with sparse rewards that computes the optimal policy exactly with no dependency on the size of the state space. The algorithm has time complexity of $O( |R|^3…
We consider a class of optimization problems over stochastic variables where the algorithm can learn information about the value of any variable through a series of costly steps; we model this information acquisition process as a Markov…
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…
Dynamic optimization of mean and variance in Markov decision processes (MDPs) is a long-standing challenge caused by the failure of dynamic programming. In this paper, we propose a new approach to find the globally optimal policy for…
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…
Markov decision processes (MDPs) describe sequential decision-making processes; MDP policies return for every state in that process an advised action. Classical algorithms can efficiently compute policies that are optimal with respect to,…
Standard value function approaches to finding policies for Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) are generally considered to be intractable for large models. The intractability of these algorithms is to a large extent a…
In this paper, we consider a discrete-time Markov Decision Process (MDP) on a finite state-action space with a long-run risk-sensitive criterion used as the objective function. We discuss the concept of Blackwell optimality and comment on…
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…
Partially-observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) with discounted-sum payoff are a standard framework to model a wide range of problems related to decision making under uncertainty. Traditionally, the goal has been to obtain policies…
In this paper, we study a mean-variance optimization problem in an infinite horizon discrete time discounted Markov decision process (MDP). The objective is to minimize the variance of system rewards with the constraint of mean performance.…
Although in recent years reinforcement learning has become very popular the number of successful applications to different kinds of operations research problems is rather scarce. Reinforcement learning is based on the well-studied dynamic…
Informed and robust decision making in the face of uncertainty is critical for robots that perform physical tasks alongside people. We formulate this as Bayesian Reinforcement Learning over latent Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). While…
A basic model in sequential decision making is the Markov decision process (MDP), which is extended to Robust MDPs (RMDPs) by allowing uncertainty in transition probabilities and optimizing against the worst-case transition probabilities…
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 (or minimize…
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…
We revisit the problem of finding optimal strategies for deterministic Markov Decision Processes (DMDPs), and a closely related problem of testing feasibility of systems of $m$ linear inequalities on $n$ real variables with at most two…
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…
We study the $(\varepsilon, \delta)$-PAC policy identification problem in finite-horizon episodic Markov Decision Processes. Existing approaches provide finite-time guarantees for approximate settings ($\varepsilon>0$) but suffer from high…