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Robust and distributionally robust optimization are modeling paradigms for decision-making under uncertainty where the uncertain parameters are only known to reside in an uncertainty set or are governed by any probability distribution from…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-07-21 Jianzhe Zhen , Daniel Kuhn , Wolfram Wiesemann

The Robust Markov Decision Process (RMDP) framework focuses on designing control policies that are robust against the parameter uncertainties due to the mismatches between the simulator model and real-world settings. An RMDP problem is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-17 Kishan Panaganti , Dileep Kalathil

One key challenge for multi-task Reinforcement learning (RL) in practice is the absence of task indicators. Robust RL has been applied to deal with task ambiguity, but may result in over-conservative policies. To balance the worst-case…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-25 Mengdi Xu , Peide Huang , Yaru Niu , Visak Kumar , Jielin Qiu , Chao Fang , Kuan-Hui Lee , Xuewei Qi , Henry Lam , Bo Li , Ding Zhao

This article aims to introduce the paradigm of distributional robustness from the field of convex optimization to tackle optimal design problems under uncertainty. We consider realistic situations where the physical model, and thereby the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-07-30 Charles Dapogny , Julien Prando , Boris Thibert

Robust Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) address environmental shift through distributionally robust optimization (DRO) by finding an optimal worst-case policy within an uncertainty set of transition kernels. However, standard DRO approaches…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-10 Akram S. Awad , Shihab Ahmed , Yue Wang , George K. Atia

In classical Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), action costs and transition probabilities are assumed to be known, although an accurate estimation of these parameters is often not possible in practice. This study addresses MDPs under cost…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-06-24 Merve Merakli , Simge Kucukyavuz

We investigate a data-driven approach to constructing uncertainty sets for robust optimization problems, where the uncertain problem parameters are modeled as random variables whose joint probability distribution is not known. Relying only…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-09-22 Polina Alexeenko , Eilyan Bitar

Distributionally robust control is a well-studied framework for optimal decision making under uncertainty, with the objective of minimizing an expected cost function over control actions, assuming the most adverse probability distribution…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-08-12 Alexandros E. Tzikas , Lukas Fiechtner , Arec Jamgochian , Mykel J. Kochenderfer

When sample data are governed by an unknown sequence of independent but possibly non-identical distributions, the data-generating process (DGP) in general cannot be perfectly identified from the data. For making decisions facing such…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2022-05-11 Xiaoyu Cheng

Addressing uncertainty is critical for autonomous systems to robustly adapt to the real world. We formulate the problem of model uncertainty as a continuous Bayes-Adaptive Markov Decision Process (BAMDP), where an agent maintains a…

We consider the problem of distributionally robust multimodal machine learning. Existing approaches often rely on merging modalities on the feature level (early fusion) or heuristic uncertainty modeling, which downplays modality-aware…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Peilin Yang , Yu Ma

We consider the problem of deciding on sampling strategy, in particular sampling design. We propose a risk measure, whose minimizing value guides the choice. The method makes use of a superpopulation model and takes into account uncertainty…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-07-06 Edgar Bueno , Dan Hedlin

This paper concerns the central issues of model robustness and sample efficiency in offline reinforcement learning (RL), which aims to learn to perform decision making from history data without active exploration. Due to uncertainties and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-01 Laixi Shi , Yuejie Chi

The goal of this paper is to analyze distributional Markov Decision Processes as a class of control problems in which the objective is to learn policies that steer the distribution of a cumulative reward toward a prescribed target law,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-09 Nicole Bäuerle , Athanasios Vasileiadis

Robust Markov decision processes (MDPs) aim to handle changing or partially known system dynamics. To solve them, one typically resorts to robust optimization methods. However, this significantly increases computational complexity and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-14 Esther Derman , Yevgeniy Men , Matthieu Geist , Shie Mannor

A common goal in statistics and machine learning is to learn models that can perform well against distributional shifts, such as latent heterogeneous subpopulations, unknown covariate shifts, or unmodeled temporal effects. We develop and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-07-21 John Duchi , Hongseok Namkoong

We consider the filtering of continuous-time finite-state hidden Markov models, where the rate and observation matrices depend on unknown time-dependent parameters, for which no prior or stochastic model is available. We quantify and…

Probability · Mathematics 2021-03-17 Andrew L. Allan

Interval Markov decision processes (IMDPs) generalise classical MDPs by having interval-valued transition probabilities. They provide a powerful modelling tool for probabilistic systems with an additional variation or uncertainty that…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2017-07-07 Ernst Moritz Hahn , Vahid Hashemi , Holger Hermanns , Morteza Lahijanian , Andrea Turrini

In distributionally robust optimization the probability distribution of the uncertain problem parameters is itself uncertain, and a fictitious adversary, e.g., nature, chooses the worst distribution from within a known ambiguity set. A…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-05-10 Etienne de Klerk , Daniel Kuhn , Krzysztof Postek

We consider large-scale Markov decision processes (MDPs) with parameter uncertainty, under the robust MDP paradigm. Previous studies showed that robust MDPs, based on a minimax approach to handle uncertainty, can be solved using dynamic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-06-27 Aviv Tamar , Huan Xu , Shie Mannor