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We study synthesis problems with constraints in partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs), where the objective is to compute a strategy for an agent that is guaranteed to satisfy certain safety and performance specifications.…

Multi-agent reinforcement learning, despite its popularity and empirical success, faces significant scalability challenges in large-population dynamic games. Graphon mean field games (GMFGs) offer a principled framework for approximating…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-06-09 Philipp Plank , Yufei Zhang

Reinforcement learning agents must painstakingly learn through trial and error what sets of state-action pairs are value equivalent -- requiring an often prohibitively large amount of environment experience. MDP homomorphisms have been…

The paper addresses two variants of the stochastic shortest path problem ('optimize the accumulated weight until reaching a goal state') in Markov decision processes (MDPs) with integer weights. The first variant optimizes partial expected…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2019-05-01 Jakob Piribauer , Christel Baier

Novel advanced policy gradient (APG) algorithms, such as proximal policy optimization (PPO), trust region policy optimization, and their variations, have become the dominant reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms because of their ease of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-05-05 Mark Gluzman

We investigate the classical active pure exploration problem in Markov Decision Processes, where the agent sequentially selects actions and, from the resulting system trajectory, aims at identifying the best policy as fast as possible. We…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-10-26 Aymen Al Marjani , Aurélien Garivier , Alexandre Proutiere

It is well known that for any finite state Markov decision process (MDP) there is a memoryless deterministic policy that maximizes the expected reward. For partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs), optimal memoryless policies…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2016-02-16 Guido Montufar , Keyan Ghazi-Zahedi , Nihat Ay

Markov decision processes (MDPs) and simple stochastic games (SSGs) provide a rich mathematical framework to study many important problems related to probabilistic systems. MDPs and SSGs with finite-horizon objectives, where the goal is to…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2012-09-18 Krishnendu Chatterjee , Rasmus Ibsen-Jensen

This work exploits action equivariance for representation learning in reinforcement learning. Equivariance under actions states that transitions in the input space are mirrored by equivalent transitions in latent space, while the map and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-28 Elise van der Pol , Thomas Kipf , Frans A. Oliehoek , Max Welling

This paper is concerned with the problem of policy evaluation with linear function approximation in discounted infinite horizon Markov decision processes. We investigate the sample complexities required to guarantee a predefined estimation…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-05-03 Gen Li , Weichen Wu , Yuejie Chi , Cong Ma , Alessandro Rinaldo , Yuting Wei

In many practical sequential decision-making problems, tracking the state of the environment incurs a sensing/communication/computation cost. In these settings, the agent's interaction with its environment includes the additional component…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Vansh Kapoor , Jayakrishnan Nair

Software-intensive systems, such as software product lines and robotics, utilise Markov decision processes (MDPs) to capture uncertainty and analyse sequential decision-making problems. Despite the usefulness of conventional policy…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-01 Alexandros Evangelidis , Gricel Vázquez , Simos Gerasimou

We study the sequential decision making problem of maximizing the expected total reward while satisfying a constraint on the expected total utility. We employ the natural policy gradient method to solve the discounted infinite-horizon…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-16 Dongsheng Ding , Kaiqing Zhang , Jiali Duan , Tamer Başar , Mihailo R. Jovanović

Hierarchies are of fundamental interest in both stochastic optimal control and biological control due to their facilitation of a range of desirable computational traits in a control algorithm and the possibility that they may form a core…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2018-01-09 Daniel McNamee

Policy gradient methods have become a standard for training reinforcement learning agents in a scalable and efficient manner. However, they do not account for transition uncertainty, whereas learning robust policies can be computationally…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-12 Navdeep Kumar , Esther Derman , Matthieu Geist , Kfir Levy , Shie Mannor

We study infinite-horizon robust Markov decision processes (MDPs) on continuous state spaces with structured rectangular ambiguity set. The proposed ambiguity set falls within the convex hull of unknown generating kernels. We utilize the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-28 Mengmeng Li , Yifan Hu , Daniel Kuhn , Yan Li

Learning compact state representations in Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) has proven crucial for addressing the curse of dimensionality in large-scale reinforcement learning (RL) problems. Existing principled approaches leverage structural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Tommaso Giorgi , Pierriccardo Olivieri , Keyue Jiang , Laura Toni , Matteo Papini

Designing a safe policy for uncertain environments is crucial in real-world control systems. However, this challenge remains inadequately addressed within the Markov decision process (MDP) framework. This paper presents the first algorithm…

Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs) formalize sequential decision-making problems whose objective is to minimize a cost function while satisfying constraints on various cost functions. In this paper, we consider the setting of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-25 Krishna C. Kalagarla , Rahul Jain , Pierluigi Nuzzo

We study the problem of learning policy of an infinite-horizon, discounted cost, Markov decision process (MDP) with a large number of states. We compute the actions of a policy that is nearly as good as a policy chosen by a suitable oracle…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-02 Masoud Badiei Khuzani , Varun Vasudevan , Hongyi Ren , Lei Xing