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Interval Markov decision processes are a class of Markov models where the transition probabilities between the states belong to intervals. In this paper, we study the problem of efficient estimation of the optimal policies in Interval…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-09-19 Saber Jafarpour , Samuel Coogan

Planning problems where effects of actions are non-deterministic can be modeled as Markov decision processes. Planning problems are usually goal-directed. This paper proposes several techniques for exploiting the goal-directedness to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2013-02-08 Nevin Lianwen Zhang , Weihong Zhang

In this paper, we consider the gradual-impulse control problem of continuous-time Markov decision processes, where the system performance is measured by the expectation of the exponential utility of the total cost. We prove, under very…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-11-16 Xin Guo , Aiko Kurushima , Alexey Piunovskiy , Yi Zhang

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

Markov decision processes (MDPs) are a popular model for performance analysis and optimization of stochastic systems. The parameters of stochastic behavior of MDPs are estimates from empirical observations of a system; their values are not…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-10-26 Dimitri Scheftelowitsch , Peter Buchholz , Vahid Hashemi , Holger Hermanns

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…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Ali Asadi , Krishnendu Chatterjee , Alipasha Montaseri , Ali Shafiee

Reinforcement Learning Algorithms are predominantly developed for stationary environments, and the limited literature that considers nonstationary environments often involves specific assumptions about changes that can occur in transition…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-25 Ranga Shaarad Ayyagari , Revanth Raj Eega , Ambedkar Dukkipati

This paper investigates methods for estimating the optimal stochastic control policy for a Markov Decision Process with unknown transition dynamics and an unknown reward function. This form of model-free reinforcement learning comprises…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-06 Brandon Trabucco , Albert Qu , Simon Li , Ganeshkumar Ashokavardhanan

While there is an extensive body of research analyzing policy gradient methods for discounted cumulative-reward MDPs, prior work on policy gradient methods for average-reward MDPs has been limited, with most existing results restricted to…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-23 Jongmin Lee , Ernest K. Ryu

Markov decision processes (MDPs) are a fundamental model in sequential decision making. Robust MDPs (RMDPs) extend this framework by allowing uncertainty in transition probabilities and optimizing against the worst-case realization of that…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Ali Asadi , Krishnendu Chatterjee , Ehsan Goharshady , Mehrdad Karrabi , Alipasha Montaseri , Carlo Pagano

In this paper we build on previous work which uses inferences techniques, in particular Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods, to solve parameterized control problems. We propose a number of modifications in order to make this approach…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-05-14 Matthias Hoffman , Hendrik Kueck , Nando de Freitas , Arnaud Doucet

We consider the problem of learning a policy for a Markov decision process consistent with data captured on the state-actions pairs followed by the policy. We assume that the policy belongs to a class of parameterized policies which are…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2017-01-24 Manjesh K. Hanawal , Hao Liu , Henghui Zhu , Ioannis Ch. Paschalidis

This work introduces a novel, simple, and flexible method to quantify irreversibility in generic high-dimensional time series based on the well-known mapping to a binary classification problem. Our approach utilizes gradient boosting for…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2025-01-09 Michele Vodret , Cristiano Pacini , Christian Bongiorno

We introduce a new framework that performs decision-making in reinforcement learning (RL) as an iterative reasoning process. We model agent behavior as the steady-state distribution of a parameterized reasoning Markov chain (RMC), optimized…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-14 Edoardo Cetin , Oya Celiktutan

We consider a Markov decision process with deterministic state transition dynamics, adversarially generated rewards that change arbitrarily from round to round, and a bandit feedback model in which the decision maker only observes the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2012-10-19 Raman Arora , Ofer Dekel , Ambuj Tewari

We consider approximate dynamic programming for the infinite-horizon stationary $\gamma$-discounted optimal control problem formalized by Markov Decision Processes. While in the exact case it is known that there always exists an optimal…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2013-04-23 Boris Lesner , Bruno Scherrer

This study addresses the challenges of dynamics and complexity in intelligent human-computer interaction and proposes a reinforcement learning-based optimization framework to improve long-term returns and overall experience. Human-computer…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2025-11-03 Rui Liu , Yifan Zhuang , Runsheng Zhang

Recently discovered polyhedral structures of the value function for finite state-action discounted Markov decision processes (MDP) shed light on understanding the success of reinforcement learning. We investigate the value function polytope…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-27 Yue Wu , Jesús A. De Loera

We study infinite-horizon Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs) with general policy parameterizations and multi-layer neural network critics. Existing theoretical analyses for constrained reinforcement learning largely rely on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Anirudh Satheesh , Pankaj Kumar Barman , Washim Uddin Mondal , Vaneet Aggarwal

Personalalized PageRank uses random walks to determine the importance or authority of nodes in a graph from the point of view of a given source node. Much past work has considered how to compute personalized PageRank from a given source…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2014-04-15 Peter Lofgren , Ashish Goel