Title
Large-Scale Markov Decision Problems via the Linear Programming Dual.
Abstract
We consider the problem of controlling a fully specified Markov decision process (MDP), also known as the planning problem, when the state space is very large and calculating the optimal policy is intractable. Instead, we pursue the more modest goal of optimizing over some small family of policies. Specifically, we show that the family of policies associated with a low-dimensional approximation of occupancy measures yields a tractable optimization. Moreover, we propose an efficient algorithm, scaling with the size of the subspace but not the state space, that is able to find a policy with low excess loss relative to the best policy in this class. To the best of our knowledge, such results did not exist in the literature previously. We bound excess loss in the average cost and discounted cost cases, which are treated separately. Preliminary experiments show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms in a queueing application.
Year
Venue
DocType
2019
arXiv: Optimization and Control
Journal
Volume
Citations 
PageRank 
abs/1901.01992
0
0.34
References 
Authors
11
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Yasin Abbasi-Yadkori127323.80
Peter L. Bartlett254821039.97
Xi Chen339931.78
Alan Malek452.29