Bisimulation for Markov decision processes through families of functional expressions

Abstract

We transfer a notion of quantitative bisimilarity for labelled Markov processes [1] to Markov decision processes with continuous state spaces. This notion takes the form of a pseudometric on the system states, cast in terms of the equivalence of a family of functional expressions evaluated on those states and interpreted as a real-valued modal logic. Our proof amounts to a slight modification of previous techniques [2,3] used to prove equivalence with a fixed-point pseudometric on the state-space of a labelled Markov process and making heavy use of the Kantorovich probability metric. Indeed, we again demonstrate equivalence with a fixed-point pseudometric defined on Markov decision processes [4]; what is novel is that we recast this proof in terms of integral probability metrics [5] defined through the family of functional expressions, shifting emphasis back to properties of such families. The hope is that a judicious choice of family might lead to something more computationally tractable than bisimilarity whilst maintaining its pleasing theoretical guarantees. Moreover, we use a trick from descriptive set theory to extend our results to MDPs with bounded measurable reward functions, dropping a previous continuity constraint on rewards and Markov kernels. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.