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[SAP26b]
Yannik Schnitzer, Alessandro Abate and David Parker.
Robust Parameter Learning for Uncertain MDPs.
In Proc. 3rd International Joint Conference on Quantitative Evaluation of Systems and Formal Modelling and Analysis of Timed Systems (QEST+FORMATS'26), Springer. To appear.
September 2026.
[pdf]
[bib]
[Presents techniques for learning uncertain MDPs with parameter dependencies, implemented as an extension of PRISM.]
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Notes:
The original publication is available at link.springer.com.
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Links:
[Google]
[Google Scholar]
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Abstract.
Learning-based approaches to verifying unknown Markov decision processes (MDPs) often employ uncertain MDPs. These models use,
for example, confidence intervals to capture transition uncertainty and
allow synthesis of policies that are robust to this uncertainty. However,
this approach typically quantifies uncertainty independently for individual
transition probabilities, ignoring dependencies due to shared latent quantities. We propose to learn such models using parametric MDPs (pMDPs),
where transition probabilities are expressions over a set of parameters. We
project statistical uncertainty from empirical transition frequencies onto
the pMDP’s parameter space, yielding a probably approximately correct
(PAC) uncertainty model for the underlying MDP that respects the algebraic dependencies between transitions. The resulting models are algorithmically challenging to solve, so we propose a hierarchy of sound polytopic
outer approximations of the induced confidence set. We implement and
evaluate our approach, demonstrating substantially tighter uncertainty estimates than classical interval-based uncertain MDP learning techniques.
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