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arXiv · 2405.18048

Expectation in Stochastic Games with Prefix-independent Objectives

Laurent Doyen·Pranshu Gaba·Shibashis Guha
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Abstract

Stochastic two-player games model systems with an environment that is both adversarial and stochastic. In this paper, we study the expected value of bounded quantitative prefix-independent objectives in the context of stochastic games. We show a generic reduction from the expectation problem to linearly many instances of the almost-sure satisfaction problem for threshold Boolean objectives. The result follows from partitioning the vertices of the game into so-called value classes where each class consists of vertices of the same value. Our procedure further entails that the memory required by both players to play optimally for the expectation problem is no more than the memory required by the players to play optimally for the almost-sure satisfaction problem for a corresponding threshold Boolean objective. We show the applicability of the framework to compute the expected window mean-payoff measure in stochastic games. The window mean-payoff measure strengthens the classical mean-payoff measure by computing the mean payoff over windows of bounded length that slide along an infinite path. We show that the decision problem to check if the expected window mean-payoff value is at least a given threshold is in UP $\cap$ coUP when the window length is given in unary.

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Laurent Doyen, Pranshu Gaba, Shibashis Guha. 2024-05-28. Expectation in Stochastic Games with Prefix-independent Objectives. https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.18048

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