English
Related papers

Related papers: Distributionally Robust Reinforcement Learning

200 papers

We address the problem of deploying a reinforcement learning (RL) agent on a physical system such as a datacenter cooling unit or robot, where critical constraints must never be violated. We show how to exploit the typically smooth dynamics…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-01-29 Gal Dalal , Krishnamurthy Dvijotham , Matej Vecerik , Todd Hester , Cosmin Paduraru , Yuval Tassa

Despite recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL), its application in safety critical domains like autonomous vehicles is still challenging. Although punishing RL agents for risky situations can help to learn safe policies, it may also…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-07-16 Danial Kamran , Tizian Engelgeh , Marvin Busch , Johannes Fischer , Christoph Stiller

A policy is said to be robust if it maximizes the reward while considering a bad, or even adversarial, model. In this work we formalize two new criteria of robustness to action uncertainty. Specifically, we consider two scenarios in which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-08 Chen Tessler , Yonathan Efroni , Shie Mannor

In a reinforcement learning (RL) setting, the agent's optimal strategy heavily depends on her risk preferences and the underlying model dynamics of the training environment. These two aspects influence the agent's ability to make…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Anthony Coache , Sebastian Jaimungal

Many real-world domains require safe decision making in uncertain environments. In this work, we introduce a deep reinforcement learning framework for approaching this important problem. We consider a distribution over transition models,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-27 James Queeney , Mouhacine Benosman

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) presents distinct challenges as it relies solely on observational data. A central concern in this context is ensuring the safety of the learned policy by quantifying uncertainties associated with various…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-03 Xiaocong Chen , Siyu Wang , Tong Yu , Lina Yao

We present a reinforcement learning (RL) approach for robust optimisation of risk-aware performance criteria. To allow agents to express a wide variety of risk-reward profiles, we assess the value of a policy using rank dependent expected…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-16 Sebastian Jaimungal , Silvana Pesenti , Ye Sheng Wang , Hariom Tatsat

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) faces significant challenges in addressing the hard-exploration problems in tasks with sparse or deceptive rewards and large state spaces. These challenges severely limit the practical application of DRL.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-03 Guojian Wang , Faguo Wu , Xiao Zhang , Ning Guo , Zhiming Zheng

The policy gradient method enjoys the simplicity of the objective where the agent optimizes the cumulative reward directly. Moreover, in the continuous action domain, parameterized distribution of action distribution allows easy control of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-16 Md Masudur Rahman , Yexiang Xue

Classical reinforcement learning (RL) techniques are generally concerned with the design of decision-making policies driven by the maximisation of the expected outcome. Nevertheless, this approach does not take into consideration the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-02 Thibaut Théate , Damien Ernst

Robust reinforcement learning (RL) aims to find a policy that optimizes the worst-case performance in the face of uncertainties. In this paper, we focus on action robust RL with the probabilistic policy execution uncertainty, in which,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-21 Guanlin Liu , Zhihan Zhou , Han Liu , Lifeng Lai

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has achieved remarkable success in sequential decision tasks. However, recent studies have revealed the vulnerability of RL policies to different perturbations, raising concerns about their effectiveness and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Buqing Nie , Yangqing Fu , Jingtian Ji , Yue Gao

The development of Distributional Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has introduced a natural way to incorporate risk sensitivity into value-based and actor-critic methods by employing risk measures other than expectation in the value function.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Mehrdad Moghimi , Hyejin Ku

In this paper, we consider the important problem of safe exploration in reinforcement learning. While reinforcement learning is well-suited to domains with complex transition dynamics and high-dimensional state-action spaces, an additional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-02-05 Javier Garcia , Fernando Fernandez

Robust Reinforcement Learning tries to make predictions more robust to changes in the dynamics or rewards of the system. This problem is particularly important when the dynamics and rewards of the environment are estimated from the data. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-15 Pierre Clavier , Stéphanie Allassonière , Erwan Le Pennec

Recently, safe reinforcement learning (RL) with the actor-critic structure for continuous control tasks has received increasing attention. It is still challenging to learn a near-optimal control policy with safety and convergence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-06 Xinglong Zhang , Yaoqian Peng , Biao Luo , Wei Pan , Xin Xu , Haibin Xie

Reinforcement learning (RL) policies often fail under dynamics that differ from training, a gap not fully addressed by domain randomization or existing adversarial RL methods. Distributionally robust RL provides a formal remedy but still…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Mintae Kim , Koushil Sreenath

For highly automated driving above SAE level~3, behavior generation algorithms must reliably consider the inherent uncertainties of the traffic environment, e.g. arising from the variety of human driving styles. Such uncertainties can…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-02-08 Julian Bernhard , Stefan Pollok , Alois Knoll

We study the problem of Distributionally Robust Constrained RL (DRC-RL), where the goal is to maximize the expected reward subject to environmental distribution shifts and constraints. This setting captures situations where training and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-25 Zhengfei Zhang , Kishan Panaganti , Laixi Shi , Yanan Sui , Adam Wierman , Yisong Yue

The multi-agent setting is intricate and unpredictable since the behaviors of multiple agents influence one another. To address this environmental uncertainty, distributional reinforcement learning algorithms that incorporate uncertainty…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-06 Jihwan Oh , Joonkee Kim , Minchan Jeong , Se-Young Yun