Related papers: A Study of Distributionally Robust Multistage Stoc…
We formulate pure characteristics demand models under uncertainties of probability distributions as distributionally robust mathematical programs with stochastic complementarity constraints (DRMP-SCC). For any fixed first-stage variable and…
Conventional stochastic control methods have several limitations. They focus on optimizing the average performance and, in some cases, performance variability; however, their problem settings still require an explicit specification of the…
We introduce an algorithm called SQDP (Stochastic Quadratic Dynamic Programming) to solve some multistage stochastic optimization problems having strongly convex recourse functions. The algorithm extends the classical Stochastic Dual…
Many stochastic optimization problems include chance constraints that enforce constraint satisfaction with a specific probability; however, solving an optimization problem with chance constraints assumes that the solver has access to the…
We present a novel distributionally robust framework for dynamic programming that uses kernel methods to design feedback control policies. Specifically, we leverage kernel mean embedding to map the transition probabilities governing the…
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…
This paper investigates group distributionally robust optimization (GDRO) with the goal of learning a model that performs well over $m$ different distributions. First, we formulate GDRO as a stochastic convex-concave saddle-point problem,…
We propose a distributionally robust approach to learning hyperparameters for first-order methods in convex optimization. Given a dataset of problem instances, we minimize a Wasserstein distributionally robust version of the performance…
We treat the problem of risk-aware control for stochastic shortest path (SSP) on Markov decision processes (MDP). Typically, expectation is considered for SSP, which however is oblivious to the incurred risk. We present an alternative view,…
Data-driven decision-making under uncertainty typically presumes the collection of historical data from an unknown target probability distribution. However, one may have no access to any data from the target distribution prior to…
Many machine learning algorithms minimize a regularized risk, and stochastic optimization is widely used for this task. When working with massive data, it is desirable to perform stochastic optimization in parallel. Unfortunately, many…
In this paper, we focus on the problem of robustifying reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms with respect to model uncertainties. Indeed, in the framework of model-based RL, we propose to merge the theory of constrained Markov decision…
In this paper, we present a Distributionally Robust Markov Decision Process (DRMDP) approach for addressing the dynamic epidemic control problem. The Susceptible-Exposed-Infectious-Recovered (SEIR) model is widely used to represent the…
Robustness is important for sequential decision making in a stochastic dynamic environment with uncertain probabilistic parameters. We address the problem of using robust MDPs (RMDPs) to compute policies with provable worst-case guarantees…
Recently, there has been a growing interest in distributionally robust optimization (DRO) as a principled approach to data-driven decision making. In this paper, we consider a distributionally robust two-stage stochastic optimization…
The stochastic subgradient method is a widely-used algorithm for solving large-scale optimization problems arising in machine learning. Often these problems are neither smooth nor convex. Recently, Davis et al. [1-2] characterized the…
This paper studies Markov Decision Processes under parameter uncertainty. We adapt the distributionally robust optimization framework, and assume that the uncertain parameters are random variables following an unknown distribution, and…
We consider risk-averse convex stochastic programs expressed in terms of extended polyhedral risk measures. We derive computable confidence intervals on the optimal value of such stochastic programs using the Robust Stochastic Approximation…
Distributionally robust supervised learning (DRSL) is emerging as a key paradigm for building reliable machine learning systems for real-world applications -- reflecting the need for classifiers and predictive models that are robust to the…
Stochastic dual dynamic programming (SDDP) is a state-of-the-art method for solving multi-stage stochastic optimization, widely used for modeling real-world process optimization tasks. Unfortunately, SDDP has a worst-case complexity that…