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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

Robust optimization safeguards decisions against uncertainty by optimizing against worst-case scenarios, yet their effectiveness hinges on a prespecified robustness level that is often chosen ad hoc, leading to either insufficient…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-02 Wenbin Zhou , Shixiang Zhu

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

Multiple-environment MDPs (MEMDPs) capture finite sets of MDPs that share the states but differ in the transition dynamics. These models form a proper subclass of partially observable MDPs (POMDPs). We consider the synthesis of policies…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2024-12-09 Marck van der Vegt , Nils Jansen , Sebastian Junges

In recent years, robust Markov decision processes (MDPs) have emerged as a prominent modeling framework for dynamic decision problems affected by uncertainty. In contrast to classical MDPs, which only account for stochasticity by modeling…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-12-14 Chin Pang Ho , Marek Petrik , Wolfram Wiesemann

In online reinforcement learning, data scarcity creates epistemic uncertainty that makes robustness important early in learning, whereas sufficient exploration is needed to learn the true-environment optimal policy. We study this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Meichen Song , Yuhao Wang , Enlu Zhou

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

Our goal is to build robust optimization problems for making decisions based on complex data from the past. In robust optimization (RO) generally, the goal is to create a policy for decision-making that is robust to our uncertainty about…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2014-07-07 Theja Tulabandhula , Cynthia Rudin

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

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

Distributionally robust optimization (DRO) incorporates robustness against uncertainty in the specification of probabilistic models. This paper focuses on mitigating the curse of dimensionality in data-driven DRO problems with optimal…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-11-01 Lotfi M. Chaouach , Tom Oomen , Dimitris Boskos

Many physical systems have underlying safety considerations that require that the policy employed ensures the satisfaction of a set of constraints. The analytical formulation usually takes the form of a Constrained Markov Decision Process…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-03 Aria HasanzadeZonuzy , Archana Bura , Dileep Kalathil , Srinivas Shakkottai

Robust Markov decision processes (MDPs) are used for applications of dynamic optimization in uncertain environments and have been studied extensively. Many of the main properties and algorithms of MDPs, such as value iteration and policy…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-12-14 Julien Grand-Clément , 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

We introduce a Bayesian (deep) model-based reinforcement learning method (RoMBRL) that can capture model uncertainty to achieve sample-efficient policy optimisation. We propose to formulate the model-based policy optimisation problem as a…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-01-06 Tai Hoang , Ngo Anh Vien

Robust Markov decision processes (r-MDPs) extend MDPs by explicitly modelling epistemic uncertainty about transition dynamics. Learning r-MDPs from interactions with an unknown environment enables the synthesis of robust policies with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-21 Yannik Schnitzer , Alessandro Abate , David Parker

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…

An open question in \emph{Imprecise Probabilistic Machine Learning} is how to empirically derive a credal region (i.e., a closed and convex family of probabilities on the output space) from the available data, without any prior knowledge or…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-01-29 Michele Caprio , David Stutz , Shuo Li , Arnaud Doucet

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

The pursuit of robustness has recently been a popular topic in reinforcement learning (RL) research, yet the existing methods generally suffer from efficiency issues that obstruct their real-world implementation. In this paper, we introduce…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-15 Yang Hu , Haitong Ma , Bo Dai , Na Li