Related papers: Acceleration Operators in the Value Iteration Algo…
We are interested in risk constraints for infinite horizon discrete time Markov decision processes (MDPs). Starting with average reward MDPs, we show that increasing concave stochastic dominance constraints on the empirical distribution of…
Entropy regularized Markov decision processes have been widely used in reinforcement learning. This paper is concerned with the primal-dual formulation of the entropy regularized problems. Standard first-order methods suffer from slow…
We study existence and uniqueness of the fixed points solutions of a large class of non-linear variable discounted transfer operators associated to a sequential decision-making process. We establish regularity properties of these solutions,…
We extend the options framework for temporal abstraction in reinforcement learning from discounted Markov decision processes (MDPs) to average-reward MDPs. Our contributions include general convergent off-policy inter-option learning…
In this paper we present a review of the connections between classical algorithms for solving Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) and classical gradient-based algorithms in convex optimization. Some of these connections date as far back as the…
We prove that the simplex method with the highest gain/most-negative-reduced cost pivoting rule converges in strongly polynomial time for deterministic Markov decision processes (MDPs) regardless of the discount factor. For a deterministic…
In this paper, we consider the problem of optimization and learning for constrained and multi-objective Markov decision processes, for both discounted rewards and expected average rewards. We formulate the problems as zero-sum games where…
We consider Markov decision processes (MDPs) with multiple limit-average (or mean-payoff) objectives. There exist two different views: (i) the expectation semantics, where the goal is to optimize the expected mean-payoff objective, and (ii)…
We introduce new planning and reinforcement learning algorithms for discounted MDPs that utilize an approximate model of the environment to accelerate the convergence of the value function. Inspired by the splitting approach in numerical…
Asynchronous algorithms have attracted much attention recently due to the crucial demands on solving large-scale optimization problems. However, the accelerated versions of asynchronous algorithms are rarely studied. In this paper, we…
This paper deals with speeding up the convergence of a class of two-step iterative methods for solving linear systems of equations. To implement the acceleration technique, the residual norm associated with computed approximations for each…
This note describes sufficient conditions under which total-cost and average-cost Markov decision processes (MDPs) with general state and action spaces, and with weakly continuous transition probabilities, can be reduced to discounted MDPs.…
We present the first finite time global convergence analysis of policy gradient in the context of infinite horizon average reward Markov decision processes (MDPs). Specifically, we focus on ergodic tabular MDPs with finite state and action…
In this work, we consider a cooperative multi-agent Markov decision process (MDP) involving m agents. At each decision epoch, all the m agents independently select actions in order to maximize a common long-term objective. In the policy…
We study reinforcement learning in infinite-horizon average-reward settings with linear MDPs. Previous work addresses this problem by approximating the average-reward setting by discounted setting and employing a value iteration-based…
This note provides upper bounds on the number of operations required to compute by value iterations a nearly optimal policy for an infinite-horizon discounted Markov decision process with a finite number of states and actions. For a given…
This paper investigates the optimization problem of an infinite stage discrete time Markov decision process (MDP) with a long-run average metric considering both mean and variance of rewards together. Such performance metric is important…
The goal of a traditional Markov decision process (MDP) is to maximize expected cumulative reward over a defined horizon (possibly infinite). In many applications, however, a decision maker may be interested in optimizing a specific…
This paper proposes an accelerated proximal point method for maximally monotone operators. The proof is computer-assisted via the performance estimation problem approach. The proximal point method includes various well-known convex…
At the working heart of policy iteration algorithms commonly used and studied in the discounted setting of reinforcement learning, the policy evaluation step estimates the value of states with samples from a Markov reward process induced by…