Post-Doctoral Research Visit F/M Safe Planning for Markov Decision Processes

The Inria Centre at Rennes University is one of Inria's nine centres and has more than thirty research teams. The Inria Centre is a major and recognized player in the field of digital sciences. It is at the heart of a rich R&D and innovation ecosystem: highly innovative PMEs, large industrial groups, competitiveness clusters, research and higher education players, laboratories of excellence, technological research institute, etc.

The post-doc position is part of a collaboration between Inria and Mitsubishi Electric R&D Centre Europe (MERCE) within the FRAIME project on artificial intelligence and formal methods. The project explores, on the one hand, how Formal Methods can provide guarantees on AI systems, and on the other hand how AI can help Formal Methods to be more efficient and easier to use by practitioners. The vision is to intertwine Formal Methods and AI to efficiently design safe systems.

This is a postdoctoral position in the fields of AI planning, formal methods, and reinforcement learning (RL). The position is initially funded for 12 months, but it is further extensible to at least another year.

While this is an academic position based at Inria Rennes, the candidate will collaborate with researchers from both Inria and MERCE, thus benefiting from both academic and industrial research environments.
The work will be done in collaboration with Nathalie Bertrand and Ocan Sankur (Inria DEVINE team https://devine.inria.fr/), Benoît Boyer and Nicolas Waldburger (MERCE).

The main objective is to develop safe planning algorithms with various degrees of confidence for variants of Markov decision processes. More precisely, we will develop algorithms for multi-environment MDPs, partially observable MDPs, and their variants and apply these in appropriate applications provided by MERCE. 

We will focus on developing practical solutions for these formalisms. Some possibilities are to develop solutions based on dynamic programming over finite horizon, or using mathematical solvers, or adapting reinforcement learning algorithms to the desired context. Furthermore, the candidate can also study theoretical properties of the developed algorithms such as their complexity, optimality, and measures such as the regret. These algorithms are expected to be validated experimentally on appropriate case studies.

The overall objective is to contribute to the state of the art of planning with strong safety guarantees.

References:
- Sun et al. Online MDP with Prototypes Information: A Robust Adaptive Approach. AAAI 2025.
- Royer et al. Multiple-environment markov decision processes: Efficient analysis and applications. ICAPS 2020.
- Chatterjee et al. The Value Problem for Multiple-Environment MDPs with Parity Objective. ICALP 2025.

This is a fully academic post-doc position. The candidate is expected to conduct research and work on applications in collaboration with other researchers, write papers, and present their research in conferences.

• PhD in computer science
• Background in probability, Markov chains, MDPs
  Knowledge about reinforcement learning and planning are a plus but not necessary for candidates with a strong theoretical background on MDPs.
• Interest in applications of planning and formal methods
• Ability to write rigorous mathematical proofs in full autonomy
• The candidate is expected to take initiatives such as reading about the state of the art, and coming up with research ideas

• Good level of English
• Good communication and reporting skills
• An interest in collaborative work

• Subsidized meals
• Partial reimbursement of public transport costs
• Leave: 7 weeks of annual leave + 10 extra days off due to RTT (statutory reduction in working hours) + possibility of exceptional leave (sick children, moving home, etc.)
• Possibility of teleworking (after 6 months of employment) and flexible organization of working hours
• Professional equipment available (videoconferencing, loan of computer equipment, etc.)
• Social, cultural and sports events and activities
• Access to vocational training

Monthly gross salary amounting to 2788 euros