Related papers: Robust Markov Decision Processes on Continuous Sta…
We study the evaluation of a policy under best- and worst-case perturbations to a Markov decision process (MDP), using transition observations from the original MDP, whether they are generated under the same or a different policy. This is…
Policy gradient methods are widely used in reinforcement learning. Yet, the nonconvexity of policy optimization poses significant challenges in understanding the global convergence of policy gradient methods. For a class of finite-horizon…
This paper describes the structure of optimal policies for infinite-state Markov Decision Processes with setwise continuous transition probabilities. The action sets may be noncompact. The objective criteria are either the expected total…
We present metrics for measuring the similarity of states in a finite Markov decision process (MDP). The formulation of our metrics is based on the notion of bisimulation for MDPs, with an aim towards solving discounted infinite horizon…
We present a unified framework based on primal-dual stochastic mirror descent for approximately solving infinite-horizon Markov decision processes (MDPs) given a generative model. When applied to an average-reward MDP with $A_{tot}$ total…
We study the problem of efficient exploration in order to learn an accurate model of an environment, modeled as a Markov decision process (MDP). Efficient exploration in this problem requires the agent to identify the regions in which…
Learning-based approaches to verifying unknown Markov decision processes (MDPs) often employ uncertain MDPs. These models use, for example, confidence intervals to capture transition uncertainty and allow synthesis of policies that are…
We revisit the identification of an $\varepsilon$-optimal policy in average-reward Markov Decision Processes (MDP). In such MDPs, two measures of complexity have appeared in the literature: the diameter, $D$, and the optimal bias span, $H$,…
Robust Markov Decision Processes (RMDPs) generalize classical MDPs that consider uncertainties in transition probabilities by defining a set of possible transition functions. An objective is a set of runs (or infinite trajectories) of the…
This paper addresses the problem of planning under uncertainty in large Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). Factored MDPs represent a complex state space using state variables and the transition model using a dynamic Bayesian network. This…
We study an approximation method for partially observed Markov decision processes (POMDPs) with continuous spaces. Belief MDP reduction, which has been the standard approach to study POMDPs requires rigorous approximation methods for…
This paper addresses the problem of model-free reinforcement learning for Robust Markov Decision Process (RMDP) with large state spaces. The goal of the RMDP framework is to find a policy that is robust against the parameter uncertainties…
This paper studies Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with atomless initial state distributions and atomless transition probabilities. Such MDPs are called atomless. The initial state distribution is considered to be fixed. We show that for…
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…
This paper addresses the challenge of a particular class of noisy state observations in Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), a common issue in various real-world applications. We focus on modeling this uncertainty through a confusion matrix…
We present the first finite-sample analysis of policy evaluation in robust average-reward Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). Prior work in this setting have established only asymptotic convergence guarantees, leaving open the question of…
We consider the problem of approximating the reachability probabilities in Markov decision processes (MDP) with uncountable (continuous) state and action spaces. While there are algorithms that, for special classes of such MDP, provide a…
Markov decision processes (MDPs) are a canonical model to reason about decision making within a stochastic environment. We study a fundamental class of infinite MDPs: one-counter MDPs (OC-MDPs). They extend finite MDPs via an associated…
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…
The problem of constrained Markov decision process (CMDP) is investigated, where an agent aims to maximize the expected accumulated discounted reward subject to multiple constraints on its utilities/costs. A new primal-dual approach is…