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Related papers: MDP Planning as Policy Inference

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Doubly robust methods hold considerable promise for off-policy evaluation in Markov decision processes (MDPs) under sequential ignorability: They have been shown to converge as $1/\sqrt{T}$ with the horizon $T$, to be statistically…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-09-30 Mohammad Mehrabi , Stefan Wager

We study a finite time horizon Markov decision process (MDP) consisting of several groups of multi-action finite-state restless bandit processes, which are identical within each group. The bandit processes into different groups can be…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-20 Jing Fu , Bill Moran , Jose Nino-Mora

Markov decision processes (MDPs) is viewed as an optimization of an objective function over certain linear operators over general function spaces. A new existence result is established for the existence of optimal policies in general MDPs,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-01 Abhishek Gupta , Aditya Mahajan

We show that the optimal decision policy for several types of Bayesian sequential detection problems has a threshold switching curve structure on the space of posterior distributions. This is established by using lattice programming and…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2015-03-17 Vikram Krishnamurthy

We consider the problem of Bayesian inference for changepoints where the number and position of the changepoints are both unknown. In particular, we consider product partition models where it is possible to integrate out model parameters…

Computation · Statistics 2017-03-14 Alan Benson , Nial Friel

We present a method for solving implicit (factored) Markov decision processes (MDPs) with very large state spaces. We introduce a property of state space partitions which we call epsilon-homogeneity. Intuitively, an epsilon-homogeneous…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2013-02-08 Thomas L. Dean , Robert Givan , Sonia Leach

Estimation and prediction in high dimensional multivariate factor stochastic volatility models is an important and active research area because such models allow a parsimonious representation of multivariate stochastic volatility. Bayesian…

Computation · Statistics 2021-04-27 David Gunawan , Robert Kohn , David Nott

Much recent research in decision theoretic planning has adopted Markov decision processes (MDPs) as the model of choice, and has attempted to make their solution more tractable by exploiting problem structure. One particular algorithm,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2013-02-08 Craig Boutilier

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

Stochastic optimal control with unknown randomness distributions has been studied for a long time, encompassing robust control, distributionally robust control, and adaptive control. We propose a new episodic Bayesian approach that…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-06-02 Alexander Shapiro , Enlu Zhou , Yifan Lin , Yuhao Wang

Relational Markov Decision Processes are a useful abstraction for complex reinforcement learning problems and stochastic planning problems. Recent work developed representation schemes and algorithms for planning in such problems using the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2012-06-26 Chenggang Wang , Roni Khardon

Many problems in sequential decision making and stochastic control often have natural multiscale structure: sub-tasks are assembled together to accomplish complex goals. Systematically inferring and leveraging hierarchical structure,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2012-12-06 Jake Bouvrie , Mauro Maggioni

We propose a sampling-based framework for finite-horizon trajectory and policy optimization under differentiable dynamics by casting controller design as inference. Specifically, we minimize a KL-regularized expected trajectory cost, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Heng Yang

Distribution shifts have long been regarded as troublesome external forces that a decision-maker should either counteract or conform to. An intriguing feedback phenomenon termed decision dependence arises when the deployed decision affects…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-03-11 Zhiyu He , Saverio Bolognani , Florian Dörfler , Michael Muehlebach

Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs) are notably more complex to solve than standard MDPs due to the absence of universally optimal policies across all initial state distributions. This necessitates re-solving the CMDP whenever the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Alperen Tercan , Necmiye Ozay

This work focuses on off-policy evaluation (OPE) with function approximation in infinite-horizon undiscounted Markov decision processes (MDPs). For MDPs that are ergodic and linear (i.e. where rewards and dynamics are linear in some known…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-24 Nevena Lazic , Dong Yin , Mehrdad Farajtabar , Nir Levine , Dilan Gorur , Chris Harris , Dale Schuurmans

A core problem in statistics and probabilistic machine learning is to compute probability distributions and expectations. This is the fundamental problem of Bayesian statistics and machine learning, which frames all inference as…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-12-06 Christian A. Naesseth , Fredrik Lindsten , Thomas B. Schön

This paper proposes a formal approach to online learning and planning for agents operating in a priori unknown, time-varying environments. The proposed method computes the maximally likely model of the environment, given the observations…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-09 Melkior Ornik , Ufuk Topcu

Motivated by the post-disaster distribution system restoration problem, in this paper, we study the problem of synthesizing the optimal policy for a Markov Decision Process (MDP) from a sequence of goal sets. For each goal set, our aim is…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-04-09 İlker Işık , Onur Yigit Arpali , Ebru Aydin Gol

Bayesian analyses combine information represented by different terms in a joint Bayesian model. When one or more of the terms is misspecified, it can be helpful to restrict the use of information from suspect model components to modify…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-06-27 Xuejun Yu , David J. Nott , Michael Stanley Smith