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 polytopic rmdp


Solving Robust Markov Decision Processes: Generic, Reliable, Efficient

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Markov decision processes (MDP) are a well-established model for sequential decision-making in the presence of probabilities. In robust MDP (RMDP), every action is associated with an uncertainty set of probability distributions, modelling that transition probabilities are not known precisely. Based on the known theoretical connection to stochastic games, we provide a framework for solving RMDPs that is generic, reliable, and efficient. It is *generic* both with respect to the model, allowing for a wide range of uncertainty sets, including but not limited to intervals, $L^1$- or $L^2$-balls, and polytopes; and with respect to the objective, including long-run average reward, undiscounted total reward, and stochastic shortest path. It is *reliable*, as our approach not only converges in the limit, but provides precision guarantees at any time during the computation. It is *efficient* because -- in contrast to state-of-the-art approaches -- it avoids explicitly constructing the underlying stochastic game. Consequently, our prototype implementation outperforms existing tools by several orders of magnitude and can solve RMDPs with a million states in under a minute.


Solving Long-run Average Reward Robust MDPs via Stochastic Games

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Markov decision processes (MDPs) provide a standard framework for sequential decision making under uncertainty. However, transition probabilities in MDPs are often estimated from data and MDPs do not take data uncertainty into account. Robust Markov decision processes (RMDPs) address this shortcoming of MDPs by assigning to each transition an uncertainty set rather than a single probability value. The goal of solving RMDPs is then to find a policy which maximizes the worst-case performance over the uncertainty sets. In this work, we consider polytopic RMDPs in which all uncertainty sets are polytopes and study the problem of solving long-run average reward polytopic RMDPs. Our focus is on computational complexity aspects and efficient algorithms. We present a novel perspective on this problem and show that it can be reduced to solving long-run average reward turn-based stochastic games with finite state and action spaces. This reduction allows us to derive several important consequences that were hitherto not known to hold for polytopic RMDPs. First, we derive new computational complexity bounds for solving long-run average reward polytopic RMDPs, showing for the first time that the threshold decision problem for them is in NP coNP and that they admit a randomized algorithm with sub-exponential expected runtime. Second, we present Robust Polytopic Policy Iteration (RPPI), a novel policy iteration algorithm for solving long-run average reward polytopic RMDPs. Our experimental evaluation shows that RPPI is much more efficient in solving long-run average reward polytopic RMDPs compared to state-of-the-art methods based on value iteration.