Robust Markov Decision Processes (RMDPs) generalize classical MDPs by allowing uncertainty in transition probabilities and optimizing against their worst-case realization. We consider (s,a)-rectangular RMDPs with linearly defined uncertainty sets and study parity objectives, which are a canonical representation of ω-regular objectives. An uncertainty set is linearly defined if it is described by linear inequalities over the transition distribution together with auxiliary variables, which capture the standard L1 and L∞ balls as well as general polytopic uncertainty sets. The quantitative value is the supremum, over all agent policies, of the satisfaction probability guaranteed against the adversarial environment. Previous work studied the qualitative analysis, namely the almost-sure (resp. positive) problem that asks whether a single agent policy guarantees satisfaction with probability one (resp. positive probability) against every environment policy. In this work, we solve the exact quantitative problem. Our contributions are threefold. First, we show that both the agent and the environment admit pure memoryless optimal policies. Second, we give a polynomial-time algorithm for quantitative parity on linearly defined robust Markov chains and use it as a subroutine in a policy-iteration algorithm for RMDPs. The algorithm combines quantitative one-step improvements with qualitative almost-sure improvements. Finally, we report experiments comparing our approach with the explicit reduction to stochastic games.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Solve time as a function of the number of states N , with one benchmark per column and one uncertainty norm per row: L1 (a–c) and L∞ (d–f). Blue solid lines show our algorithm and red dashed lines the baseline; within each color, dark circles mark the reachability objective and light triangles the parity objective (Frozen Lake is reachability-only). Each point is the mean over 10 random seeds, with error bars and shaded bands giving one standard deviation. The dotted horizontal line is the 120s timeout, and a × marks a timed-out.
Appendix figures & tables1 asset
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
Figure 2: Comparison between number of iterations of the policy iteration algorithm on our benchmarks. The number of iterations is much smaller than the theoretical worst-case bound.