Percentile Optimization for Markov Decision Processes with Parameter Uncertainty
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Markov decision processes are an effective tool in modeling decision making in uncertain dynamic environments. Because the parameters of these models typically are estimated from data or learned from experience, it is not surprising that the actual performance of a chosen strategy often differs significantly from the designer's initial expectations due to unavoidable modeling ambiguity. In this paper, we present a set of percentile criteria that are conceptually natural and representative of the trade-off between optimistic and pessimistic views of the question. We study the use of these criteria under different forms of uncertainty for both the rewards and the transitions. Some forms are shown to be efficiently solvable and others highly intractable. In each case, we outline solution concepts that take parametric uncertainty into account in the process of decision making.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it