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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

Robust Markov decision processes (MDPs) have attracted significant interest due to their ability to protect MDPs from poor out-of-sample performance in the presence of ambiguity. In contrast to classical MDPs, which account for…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-06 Chin Pang Ho , Marek Petrik , Wolfram Wiesemann

Distributionally robust optimization (DRO) studies decision problems under uncertainty where the probability distribution governing the uncertain problem parameters is itself uncertain. A key component of any DRO model is its ambiguity set,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-05-28 Daniel Kuhn , Soroosh Shafiee , Wolfram Wiesemann

Markov decision processes (MDPs) are known to be sensitive to parameter specification. Distributionally robust MDPs alleviate this issue by allowing for \emph{ambiguity sets} which give a set of possible distributions over parameter sets.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-05-05 Julien Grand-Clément , Christian Kroer

Distributionally robust optimization is used to tackle decision making problems under uncertainty where the distribution of the uncertain data is ambiguous. Many ambiguity sets have been proposed for continuous uncertainty that build on…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-05-28 Karthik Natarajan , Divya Padmanabhan , Arjun Ramachandra

Optimal policies in Markov decision processes (MDPs) are very sensitive to model misspecification. This raises serious concerns about deploying them in high-stake domains. Robust MDPs (RMDP) provide a promising framework to mitigate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-06 Reazul Hasan Russel , Bahram Behzadian , Marek Petrik

We study decision dependent distributionally robust optimization models, where the ambiguity sets of probability distributions can depend on the decision variables. These models arise in situations with endogenous uncertainty. The developed…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-06-26 Fengqiao Luo , Sanjay Mehrotra

The main goal of this paper is to discuss several approaches to formulation of distributionally robust counterparts of Markov Decision Processes, where the transition kernels are not specified exactly but rather are assumed to be elements…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-05-07 Yan Li , Alexander Shapiro

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

In this paper, we study the distributionally robust joint chance constrained Markov decision process. {Utilizing the logarithmic transformation technique,} we derive its deterministic reformulation with bi-convex terms under the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-01-03 Tian Xia , Jia Liu , Zhiping Chen

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

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

A decision-maker faces uncertainty governed by a data-generating process (DGP), which is only known to belong to a set of sequences of independent but possibly non-identical distributions. A robust decision maximizes the expected payoff…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-02-12 Xiaoyu Cheng

We propose policy gradient algorithms for robust infinite-horizon Markov decision processes (MDPs) with non-rectangular uncertainty sets, thereby addressing an open challenge in the robust MDP literature. Indeed, uncertainty sets that…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-09-30 Mengmeng Li , Daniel Kuhn , Tobias Sutter

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-06-27 Jun Song , William Yang , Chaoyue Zhao

Robust Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) are receiving much attention in learning a robust policy which is less sensitive to environment changes. There are an increasing number of works analyzing sample-efficiency of robust MDPs. However,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-09-13 Wenhao Yang , Han Wang , Tadashi Kozuno , Scott M. Jordan , Zhihua Zhang

This paper is devoted to reduce the conservatism of distributionally robust optimization with moments information. Since the optimal solution of distributionally robust optimization is required to be feasible for all uncertain distributions…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-08-20 Ke-wei Ding , Nan-jing Huang , Lei Wang

In offline reinforcement learning (RL), the absence of active exploration calls for attention on the model robustness to tackle the sim-to-real gap, where the discrepancy between the simulated and deployed environments can significantly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-28 He Wang , Laixi Shi , Yuejie Chi

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 2021-10-14 Esther Derman , Matthieu Geist , Shie Mannor

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