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This paper is devoted to studying the average optimality in continuous-time Markov decision processes with fairly general state and action spaces. The criterion to be maximized is expected average rewards. The transition rates of underlying…

Probability · Mathematics 2007-05-23 Xianping Guo , Ulrich Rieder

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…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-02-11 Gilwoo Lee , Brian Hou , Sanjiban Choudhury , Siddhartha S. Srinivasa

We study the common generalization of Markov decision processes (MDPs) with sets of transition probabilities, known as robust MDPs (RMDPs). A standard goal in RMDPs is to compute a policy that maximizes the expected return under an…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-20 Alessandro Abate , Thom Badings , Giuseppe De Giacomo , Francesco Fabiano

Markov decision processes (MDPs) are the defacto frame-work for sequential decision making in the presence ofstochastic uncertainty. A classical optimization criterion forMDPs is to maximize the expected discounted-sum pay-off, which…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-02-28 Tomas Brazdil , Krishnendu Chatterjee , Petr Novotny , Jiri Vahala

We present a model-free reinforcement learning algorithm to find an optimal policy for a finite-horizon Markov decision process while guaranteeing a desired lower bound on the probability of satisfying a signal temporal logic (STL)…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-09-29 Krishna C. Kalagarla , Rahul Jain , Pierluigi Nuzzo

Robust Markov decision processes (MDPs) address the challenge of model uncertainty by optimizing the worst-case performance over an uncertainty set of MDPs. In this paper, we focus on the robust average-reward MDPs under the model-free…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-19 Yue Wang , Alvaro Velasquez , George Atia , Ashley Prater-Bennette , Shaofeng Zou

Robust Markov decision processes (MDPs) allow to compute reliable solutions for dynamic decision problems whose evolution is modeled by rewards and partially-known transition probabilities. Unfortunately, accounting for uncertainty in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-18 Chin Pang Ho , Marek Petrik , Wolfram Wiesemann

We study multi-objective reinforcement learning with nonlinear preferences over trajectories. That is, we maximize the expected value of a nonlinear function over accumulated rewards (expected scalarized return or ESR) in a multi-objective…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-19 Nianli Peng , Muhang Tian , Brandon Fain

We use the Reward Biased Maximum Likelihood Estimation (RBMLE) algorithm to learn optimal policies for constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs). We analyze the learning regrets of RBMLE.

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-05-31 Rahul Singh

Many processes, such as discrete event systems in engineering or population dynamics in biology, evolve in discrete space and continuous time. We consider the problem of optimal decision making in such discrete state and action space…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-27 Bastian Alt , Matthias Schultheis , Heinz Koeppl

Markov decision processes (MDP) and continuous-time MDP (CTMDP) are the fundamental models for non-deterministic systems with probabilistic uncertainty. Mean payoff (a.k.a. long-run average reward) is one of the most classic objectives…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-06-06 Chaitanya Agarwal , Shibashis Guha , Jan Křetínský , M. Pazhamalai

We consider killed Markov decision processes for countable models on a finite time-interval. Existence of a uniform $\varepsilon$-optimal policy is proven. We show the correctness of the fundamental equation. The optimal control problem is…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2013-04-10 Nestor Parolya , Yaroslav Yeleyko

Safety is a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), particularly in real-world applications such as autonomous driving, robotics, and healthcare. To address this, Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs) are commonly used…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-18 Chang Liu , Yunfan Li , Lin F. Yang

Distributional reinforcement learning improves performance by capturing environmental stochasticity, but a comprehensive theoretical understanding of its effectiveness remains elusive. In addition, the intractable element of the infinite…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-14 Taehyun Cho , Seungyub Han , Seokhun Ju , Dohyeong Kim , Kyungjae Lee , Jungwoo Lee

We consider Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with deterministic transitions and study the problem of regret minimization, which is central to the analysis and design of optimal learning algorithms. We present logarithmic problem-specific…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-29 Damianos Tranos , Alexandre Proutiere

Markov decision problems are most commonly solved via dynamic programming. Another approach is Bellman residual minimization, which directly minimizes the squared Bellman residual objective function. However, compared to dynamic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Donghwan Lee , Hyukjun Yang

Reinforcement learning algorithms often require finiteness of state and action spaces in Markov decision processes (MDPs) (also called controlled Markov chains) and various efforts have been made in the literature towards the applicability…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-08 Ali Devran Kara , Naci Saldi , Serdar Yüksel

We study model-based learning of finite-window policies in tabular partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs). A common approach to learning under partial observability is to approximate unbounded history dependencies using…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Philip Jordan , Maryam Kamgarpour

A wide variety of queueing systems can be naturally modeled as infinite-state Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). In the reinforcement learning (RL) context, a variety of algorithms have been developed to learn and optimize these MDPs. At the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-14 Isaac Grosof , Siva Theja Maguluri , R. Srikant

The standard Dynamic Programming (DP) formulation can be used to solve Multi-Stage Optimization Problems (MSOP's) with additively separable objective functions. In this paper we consider a larger class of MSOP's with monotonically backward…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-10-15 Morgan Jones , Matthew Peet