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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

Learning-based approaches to verifying unknown Markov decision processes (MDPs) often employ uncertain MDPs. These models use, for example, confidence intervals to capture transition uncertainty and allow synthesis of policies that are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Yannik Schnitzer , Alessandro Abate , David Parker

We study robust Markov decision processes (RMDPs) with non-rectangular uncertainty sets, which capture interdependencies across states unlike traditional rectangular models. While non-rectangular robust policy evaluation is generally…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-02-14 Navdeep Kumar , Adarsh Gupta , Maxence Mohamed Elfatihi , Giorgia Ramponi , Kfir Yehuda Levy , Shie Mannor

Robust Bayesian inference is the calculation of posterior probability bounds given perturbations in a probabilistic model. This paper focuses on perturbations that can be expressed locally in Bayesian networks through convex sets of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2013-02-08 Fabio Gagliardi Cozman

Informed and robust decision making in the face of uncertainty is critical for robots that perform physical tasks alongside people. We formulate this as Bayesian Reinforcement Learning over latent Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). While…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-02-11 Gilwoo Lee , Brian Hou , Sanjiban Choudhury , Siddhartha S. Srinivasa

Reinforcement learning has demonstrated impressive performance in various challenging problems such as robotics, board games, and classical arcade games. However, its real-world applications can be hindered by the absence of robustness and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Siemen Herremans , Ali Anwar , Siegfried Mercelis

Stochastic and soft optimal policies resulting from entropy-regularized Markov decision processes (ER-MDP) are desirable for exploration and imitation learning applications. Motivated by the fact that such policies are sensitive with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-03 Tien Mai , Patrick Jaillet

Markov decision processes (MDP) are a well-established model for sequential decision-making in the presence of probabilities. In robust MDP (RMDP), every action is associated with an uncertainty set of probability distributions, modelling…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-12-16 Tobias Meggendorfer , Maximilian Weininger , Patrick Wienhöft

This paper investigates model robustness in reinforcement learning (RL) to reduce the sim-to-real gap in practice. We adopt the framework of distributionally robust Markov decision processes (RMDPs), aimed at learning a policy that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-09 Laixi Shi , Gen Li , Yuting Wei , Yuxin Chen , Matthieu Geist , Yuejie Chi

We propose a refinement of the maxmin approach to robustness. A mechanism's payoff guarantee over an ambiguity set is \emph{robust} if the guarantee is approximately satisfied at priors near the ambiguity set (in the weak topology). We show…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-05-06 Ian Ball , Deniz Kattwinkel

An important problem in statistics is the construction of confidence regions for unknown parameters. In most cases, asymptotic distribution theory is used to construct confidence regions, so any coverage probability claims only hold…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2014-10-28 Ryan Martin

A basic model in sequential decision making is the Markov decision process (MDP), which is extended to Robust MDPs (RMDPs) by allowing uncertainty in transition probabilities and optimizing against the worst-case transition probabilities…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Ali Asadi , Krishnendu Chatterjee , Alipasha Montaseri , Ali Shafiee

In reinforcement learning, robust policies for high-stakes decision-making problems with limited data are usually computed by optimizing the \emph{percentile criterion}. The percentile criterion is approximately solved by constructing an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-09 Elita A. Lobo , Cyrus Cousins , Yair Zick , Marek Petrik

In order for reinforcement learning techniques to be useful in real-world decision making processes, they must be able to produce robust performance from limited data. Deep policy optimization methods have achieved impressive results on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-22 James Queeney , Ioannis Ch. Paschalidis , Christos G. Cassandras

Distributionally robust optimization (DRO) has been introduced for solving stochastic programs where the distribution of the random parameters is unknown and must be estimated by samples from that distribution. A key element of DRO is the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-01-09 Xi Chen , Qihang Lin , Guanglin Xu

We consider a robust approach to address uncertainty in model parameters in Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), which are widely used to model dynamic optimization in many applications. Most prior works consider the case where the uncertainty…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-09-02 Vineet Goyal , Julien Grand-Clément

Robust Markov Decision Processes (RMDPs) have received significant research interest, offering an alternative to standard Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) that often assume fixed transition probabilities. RMDPs address this by optimizing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-06 Xinyi Ni , Lifeng Lai

Decision making under uncertainty is challenging as the data-generating process (DGP) is often unknown. Bayesian inference proceeds by estimating the DGP through posterior beliefs on the model's parameters. However, minimising the expected…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-13 Charita Dellaporta , Patrick O'Hara , Theodoros Damoulas

Constrained reinforcement learning is to maximize the expected reward subject to constraints on utilities/costs. However, the training environment may not be the same as the test one, due to, e.g., modeling error, adversarial attack,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-16 Yue Wang , Fei Miao , Shaofeng Zou

We consider Markov decision processes (MDPs) with unknown disturbance distribution and address this problem using the robust Markov decision process (RMDP) approach. We construct the empirical distribution of the unknown disturbance…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-11 Sivaramakrishnan Ramani