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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

Research in machine learning is making progress in fixing its own reproducibility crisis. Reinforcement learning (RL), in particular, faces its own set of unique challenges. Comparison of point estimates, and plots that show successful…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-07 Ted Fujimoto , Joshua Suetterlein , Samrat Chatterjee , Auroop Ganguly

We study distributionally robust online learning, where a risk-averse learner updates decisions sequentially to guard against worst-case distributions drawn from a Wasserstein ambiguity set centered at past observations. While this paradigm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-25 Guixian Chen , Salar Fattahi , Soroosh Shafiee

In distributed optimization, the practical problem-solving performance is essentially sensitive to algorithm selection, parameter setting, problem type and data pattern. Thus, it is often laborious to acquire a highly efficient method for a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-01-04 Daokuan Zhu , Tianqi Xu , Jie Lu

Sequential decision making in the presence of uncertainty and stochastic dynamics gives rise to distributions over state/action trajectories in reinforcement learning (RL) and optimal control problems. This observation has led to a variety…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-30 Jad Rahme , Ryan P. Adams

Reinforcement learning (RL) struggles to scale to large, combinatorial action spaces common in many real-world problems. This paper introduces a novel framework for training discrete diffusion models as highly effective policies in these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Haitong Ma , Ofir Nabati , Aviv Rosenberg , Bo Dai , Oran Lang , Craig Boutilier , Na Li , Shie Mannor , Lior Shani , Guy Tenneholtz

Distributionally robust offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to find a policy that performs the best under the worst environment within an uncertainty set using an offline dataset collected from a nominal model. While recent advances in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-07 Ruiquan Huang , Yingbin Liang , Jing Yang

Distributionally Robust Optimization (DRO) has enabled to prove the equivalence between robustness and regularization in classification and regression, thus providing an analytical reason why regularization generalizes well in statistical…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-07-15 Esther Derman , Shie Mannor

Distributionally robust control (DRC) aims to effectively manage distributional ambiguity in stochastic systems. While most existing works address inaccurate distributional information in fully observable settings, we consider a partially…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-12-23 Astghik Hakobyan , Insoon Yang

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has recently received significant attention from the process systems engineering and control communities. Recent works have investigated the application of RL to identify optimal scheduling decision in the…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-03-11 Max Mowbray , Dongda Zhang , Ehecatl Antonio Del Rio Chanona

Distributionally robust optimization (DRO) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for reliable decision-making under uncertainty. This paper focuses on DRO with ambiguity sets defined via the Sinkhorn discrepancy: an entropy-regularized…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-12-16 Jie Wang

This paper contributes a new approach for distributional reinforcement learning which elucidates a clean separation of transition structure and reward in the learning process. Analogous to how the successor representation (SR) describes the…

Among the reasons hindering reinforcement learning (RL) applications to real-world problems, two factors are critical: limited data and the mismatch between the testing environment (real environment in which the policy is deployed) and the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-30 Xiaoteng Ma , Zhipeng Liang , Jose Blanchet , Mingwen Liu , Li Xia , Jiheng Zhang , Qianchuan Zhao , Zhengyuan Zhou

This work presents a new Distributionally Robust Optimization approach, using $p$-Wasserstein metrics, to analyze a stochastic program in a general context. The ambiguity set in this approach depends on the decision variable and is…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-03-08 Diego Fonseca , Mauricio Junca

We investigate reinforcement learning (RL) in the presence of distributional mismatch between training and deployment, where policies trained in simulators often underperform in practice due to mismatches between training and deployment…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-12 Debamita Ghosh , George K. Atia , Yue Wang

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

Reinforcement learning (RL) allows an agent interacting sequentially with an environment to maximize its long-term expected return. In the distributional RL (DistrRL) paradigm, the agent goes beyond the limit of the expected value, to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-01 Mastane Achab , Reda Alami , Yasser Abdelaziz Dahou Djilali , Kirill Fedyanin , Eric Moulines

The goal of an offline reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm is to learn optimal polices using historical (offline) data, without access to the environment for online exploration. One of the main challenges in offline RL is the distribution…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Kishan Panaganti , Zaiyan Xu , Dileep Kalathil , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh

Distributional reinforcement learning (DRL) has achieved empirical success in various domains. One core task in DRL is distributional policy evaluation, which involves estimating the return distribution $\eta^\pi$ for a given policy $\pi$.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-01-17 Yang Peng , Liangyu Zhang , Zhihua Zhang

Standard deep reinforcement learning (DRL) aims to maximize expected reward, considering collected experiences equally in formulating a policy. This differs from human decision-making, where gains and losses are valued differently and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-17 Jared Markowitz , Ryan W. Gardner , Ashley Llorens , Raman Arora , I-Jeng Wang