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Poster

On the Use of Non-Stationary Policies for Stationary Infinite-Horizon Markov Decision Processes

Bruno Scherrer · Boris Lesner

Harrah’s Special Events Center 2nd Floor

Abstract: We consider infinite-horizon stationary γ-discounted Markov Decision Processes, for which it is known that there exists a stationary optimal policy. Using Value and Policy Iteration with some error ϵ at each iteration, it is well-known that one can compute stationary policies that are \frac{2\gamma{(1-\gamma)^2}\epsilon-optimal. After arguing that this guarantee is tight, we develop variations of Value and Policy Iteration for computing non-stationary policies that can be up to 2γ1γϵ-optimal, which constitutes a significant improvement in the usual situation when γ is close to 1. Surprisingly, this shows that the problem of computing near-optimal non-stationary policies'' is much simpler than that of computing near-optimal stationary policies''.

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