From MDPs to general-utility MDPs

Bringing risk-awareness to general-utility MDPs

We motivate and explore risk-aware general-utility MDPs, where we aim to find an optimal policy with respect to a risk measure of the distribution of objective values induced by its interaction with the MDP.

August 2026 · Pedro P. Santos (based in joint work with Fábio Vital, Alberto Sardinha, and Francisco S. Melo)
From MDPs to general-utility MDPs

From MDPs to general-utility MDPs

We explore how general-utility Markov decision processes (GUMDPs) can encode a more rich set of objectives than those considered by the framework of MDPs (with stationary cost functions).

August 2026 · Pedro P. Santos