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Off-policy evaluation and learning are concerned with assessing a given policy and learning an optimal policy from offline data without direct interaction with the environment. Often, the environment in which the data are collected differs…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-18 Yi Shen , Pan Xu , Michael M. Zavlanos

Performativity means that the deployment of a predictive model incentivizes agents to strategically adapt their behavior, thereby inducing a model-dependent distribution shift. Practitioners often repeatedly retrain the model on data…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-09 Siyi Wang , Zifan Wang , Karl H. Johansson

Stochastic dominance is a preference relation of uncertain prospect defined over a class of utility functions. While this utility class represents basic properties of risk aversion, it includes some extreme utility functions rarely…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2015-12-29 Jian Hu , Gevorg Stepanyan

In this work, we present a new model-free and off-policy reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm, that is capable of finding a near-optimal policy with state-action observations from arbitrary behavior policies. Our algorithm, called the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-07-21 Narim Jeong , Donghwan Lee , Niao He

We propose a distributional framework for offline Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) that jointly models uncertainty over reward functions and full distributions of returns. Unlike conventional IRL approaches that recover a deterministic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Feiyang Wu , Ye Zhao , Anqi Wu

We introduce an innovative approach that incorporates a Distributionally Robust Learning (DRL) approach into Cox regression to enhance the robustness and accuracy of survival predictions. By formulating a DRL framework with a Wasserstein…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Yeping Jin , Lauren Wise , Ioannis Ch. Paschalidis

Statistical learning under distribution shift is challenging when neither prior knowledge nor fully accessible data from the target distribution is available. Distributionally robust learning (DRL) aims to control the worst-case statistical…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-12-19 Yu Gui , Rina Foygel Barber , Cong Ma

Machine learning algorithms with empirical risk minimization are vulnerable under distributional shifts due to the greedy adoption of all the correlations found in training data. Recently, there are robust learning methods aiming at this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-12 Jiashuo Liu , Zheyan Shen , Peng Cui , Linjun Zhou , Kun Kuang , Bo Li , Yishi Lin

Due to the nature of risk management in learning applicable policies, risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RSRL) has been realized as an important direction. RSRL is usually achieved by learning risk-sensitive objectives characterized by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Ruiwen Zhou , Minghuan Liu , Kan Ren , Xufang Luo , Weinan Zhang , Dongsheng Li

Given the inherent non-stationarity prevalent in real-world applications, continual Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims to equip the agent with the capability to address a series of sequentially presented decision-making tasks. Within this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-19 Feng Chen , Fuguang Han , Cong Guan , Lei Yuan , Zhilong Zhang , Yang Yu , Zongzhang Zhang

Distributional reinforcement learning (DRL) is a recent reinforcement learning framework whose success has been supported by various empirical studies. It relies on the key idea of replacing the expected return with the return distribution,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-09 Rahul Singh , Keuntaek Lee , Yongxin Chen

To date, distributional reinforcement learning (distributional RL) methods have exclusively focused on the discounted setting, where an agent aims to optimize a discounted sum of rewards over time. In this work, we extend distributional RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Juan Sebastian Rojas , Chi-Guhn Lee

Reinforcement learning (RL) tackles sequential decision-making problems by creating agents that interacts with their environment. However, existing algorithms often view these problem as static, focusing on point estimates for model…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-03-21 Frank Shih , Faming Liang

Most conventional Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms aim to optimize decision-making rules in terms of the expected returns. However, especially for risk management purposes, other risk-sensitive criteria such as the value-at-risk or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-03-19 Tetsuro Morimura , Masashi Sugiyama , Hisashi Kashima , Hirotaka Hachiya , Toshiyuki Tanaka

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

Seeking to improve model generalization, we consider a new approach based on distributionally robust learning (DRL) that applies stochastic gradient descent to the outer minimization problem. Our algorithm efficiently estimates the gradient…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-12-24 Soumyadip Ghosh , Mark Squillante

Policy optimization is a core component of reinforcement learning (RL), and most existing RL methods directly optimize parameters of a policy based on maximizing the expected total reward, or its surrogate. Though often achieving…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-08-10 Ruiyi Zhang , Changyou Chen , Chunyuan Li , Lawrence Carin

We consider a distributionally robust formulation of stochastic optimization problems arising in statistical learning, where robustness is with respect to uncertainty in the underlying data distribution. Our formulation builds on…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-06-09 Mert Gürbüzbalaban , Andrzej Ruszczyński , Landi Zhu

In reinforcement learning (RL), it is often advantageous to consider additional constraints on the action space to ensure safety or action relevance. Existing work on such action-constrained RL faces challenges regarding effective policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Roland Stolz , Michael Eichelbeck , Matthias Althoff

We present a distributional approach to theoretical analyses of reinforcement learning algorithms for constant step-sizes. We demonstrate its effectiveness by presenting simple and unified proofs of convergence for a variety of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-30 Philip Amortila , Doina Precup , Prakash Panangaden , Marc G. Bellemare