# Questions tagged [markov-decision-process]

For questions related to the concept of Markov decision process (MDP), which is a mathematical framework for modeling decision making in situations where outcomes are partly random and partly under the control of a decision-maker. The concept of MDP is useful for studying optimization problems solved via dynamic programming and reinforcement learning.

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### Why is learning $s'$ from $s,a$ a kernel density estimation problem but learning $r$ from $s,a$ is just regression?

In David Silver's 8th lecture he talks about model learning and says that learning $r$ from $s,a$ is a regression problem whereas learning $s'$ from $s,a$ is a kernel density estimation. His ...
68 views

### How do I convert an MDP with the reward function in the form $R(s,a,s')$ to and an MDP with a reward function in the form $R(s,a)$?

The AIMA book has an exercise about showing that an MDP with rewards of the form $r(s, a, s')$ can be converted to an MDP with rewards $r(s, a)$, and to an MDP with rewards $r(s)$ with equivalent ...
174 views

### Why is the policy not a part of the MDP definition?

I'm reading an article on reinforcement learning, and I don't understand why the agent's policy $\pi$ is not part of definition of Markov Decision process(MDP): Bu, Lucian, Robert Babu, and ...
50 views

### Can we use a Gaussian process to approximate the belief distribution at every instant in a POMDP?

Suppose $x_{t+1} \sim \mathbb{P}(\cdot | x_t, a_t)$ denotes the state transition dynamics in a reinforcement learning (RL) problem. Let $y_{t+1} = \mathbb{P}(\cdot | x_{t+1})$ denote the noisy ...
125 views

### How can blackjack be formulated as a Markov decision process?

I am reading sutton barton's reinforcement learning textbook and have come across the finite Markov decision process (MDP) example of the blackjack game (Example 5.1). Isn't the environment ...
24 views

### State-of-the-art algorithms not working on a custom RL environment

I'm trying to train a RL agent on a custom, highly stochastic environment (MDP). In order to do so I'm using existing implementations of state-of-the-art RL algorithms as provided by Stable Baselines. ...
25 views

### What is the difference between the state transition of an MDP and an action-value?

Let's say we have MDP where we have a state transition matrix. How is this state transition different from action value in reinforcement learning? Is the state transition in MDP stochastic ...
34 views

### How are the classical MDP and the object-oriented MDP views different?

I've been reading the attached paper - which aims to model entities in the world as objects, including the learning agent itself! To say the least, the goal is to navigate through what seems like a ...
60 views

### Why does it make sense to study MDPs with finite state and action spaces?

In the standard Markov Decision Process (MDP) formalization of the reinforcement-learning (RL) problem (Sutton & Barto, 1998), a decision maker interacts with an environment consisting of finite ...
27 views

### Can optimizing for immediate reward result in a policy maximizing the return?

The goal of a reinforcement learning agent is to maximize the expected return which is often a discounted sum of future rewards. The return indeed is a very noisy random variable as future rewards ...
16 views

### Relationship between the reward rate and the sampled reward in a Semi-Markov Decision Process

In the paper: Reinforcement learning methods for continuous-time Markov decision problems, the authors provide the following update rule for the Q-learning algorithm, when applied to Semi-Markov ...
122 views

### Formula for expected rewards for state–action–next-state triples as a three-argument function

While reading about reinforcement learning, I have come across the following expression for expected rewards in terms of a summation, the denominator of which I am not able to account for. The ...
22 views