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This paper investigates the so-called reward-balancing methods, a novel class of algorithms for solving discounted-return reinforcement learning (RL) problems. These methods consist of iteratively adjusting the reward function to transform…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-23 Simone Baroncini , Bahman Gharesifard , Giuseppe Notarstefano

State estimation in the presence of uncertain or data-driven noise distributions remains a critical challenge in control and robotics. Although the Kalman filter is the most popular choice, its performance degrades significantly when…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-04-01 Minhyuk Jang , Astghik Hakobyan , Insoon Yang

We introduce a distributional method for learning the optimal policy in risk averse Markov decision process with finite state action spaces, latent costs, and stationary dynamics. We assume sequential observations of states, actions, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-01 Ziteng Cheng , Sebastian Jaimungal , Nick Martin

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has proven highly effective in addressing complex control and decision-making tasks. However, in most traditional RL algorithms, the policy is typically parameterized as a diagonal Gaussian distribution, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Ruijie Hao , Longfei Zhang , Yang Dai , Yang Ma , Xingxing Liang , Guangquan Cheng

When decisions are made at high frequency, traditional reinforcement learning (RL) methods struggle to accurately estimate action values. In turn, their performance is inconsistent and often poor. Whether the performance of distributional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-16 Harley Wiltzer , Marc G. Bellemare , David Meger , Patrick Shafto , Yash Jhaveri

Enhancing the stability of machine learning algorithms under distributional shifts is at the heart of the Out-of-Distribution (OOD) Generalization problem. Derived from causal learning, recent works of invariant learning pursue strict…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-15 Jiashuo Liu , Jiayun Wu , Jie Peng , Xiaoyu Wu , Yang Zheng , Bo Li , Peng Cui

We propose a new reinforcement learning (RL) formulation for training continuous-time score-based diffusion models for generative AI to generate samples that maximize reward functions while keeping the generated distributions close to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-12 Xuefeng Gao , Jiale Zha , Xun Yu Zhou

Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a promising approach for next-generation wireless networks, where online exploration is unsafe and large amounts of operational data can be reused across the model lifecycle. However, the behavior of…

Networking and Internet Architecture · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Nicolas Helson , Pegah Alizadeh , Anastasios Giovanidis

This paper targets the efficient construction of a safety shield for decision making in scenarios that incorporate uncertainty. Markov decision processes (MDPs) are prominent models to capture such planning problems. Reinforcement learning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-11-26 Nils Jansen , Bettina Könighofer , Sebastian Junges , Alexandru C. Serban , Roderick Bloem

In this work, we address the problem of determining reliable policies in reinforcement learning (RL), with a focus on optimization under uncertainty and the need for performance guarantees. While classical RL algorithms aim at maximizing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Nadir Farhi

We consider a discrete time stochastic Markovian control problem under model uncertainty. Such uncertainty not only comes from the fact that the true probability law of the underlying stochastic process is unknown, but the parametric family…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-03-23 Erhan Bayraktar , Tao Chen

Self-paced reinforcement learning (RL) aims to improve the data efficiency of learning by automatically creating sequences, namely curricula, of probability distributions over contexts. However, existing techniques for self-paced RL fail in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-29 Cevahir Koprulu , Ufuk Topcu

We devise a distributional variant of gradient temporal-difference (TD) learning. Distributional reinforcement learning has been demonstrated to outperform the regular one in the recent study \citep{bellemare2017distributional}. In the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-04-04 Chao Qu , Shie Mannor , Huan Xu

Off-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL) holds the promise of better data efficiency as it allows sample reuse and potentially enables safe interaction with the environment. Current off-policy policy gradient methods either suffer from high…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-09 Samuele Tosatto , João Carvalho , Jan Peters

This paper presents a novel methodology for tractably solving optimal control and offline reinforcement learning problems for high-dimensional systems. This work is motivated by the ongoing challenges of safety, computation, and optimality…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-07-06 Aaron Kandel , Saehong Park , Scott Moura

This article extends the optimal covariance steering (CS) problem for discrete time linear stochastic systems modeled using moment-based ambiguity sets. To hedge against the uncertainty in the state distributions while performing covariance…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-11-09 Venkatraman Renganathan , Joshua Pilipovsky , Panagiotis Tsiotras

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) is suitable for safety-critical domains where online exploration is too costly or dangerous. In such safety-critical settings, decision-making should take into consideration the risk of catastrophic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Marc Rigter , Bruno Lacerda , Nick Hawes

We propose a novel algorithmic framework for distributional reinforcement learning, based on learning finite-dimensional mean embeddings of return distributions. We derive several new algorithms for dynamic programming and…

Local decision rules are commonly understood to be more explainable, due to the local nature of the patterns involved. With numerical optimization methods such as gradient boosting, ensembles of local decision rules can gain good predictive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-27 Xin Du , Subramanian Ramamoorthy , Wouter Duivesteijn , Jin Tian , Mykola Pechenizkiy

In the realm of reinforcement learning (RL), accounting for risk is crucial for making decisions under uncertainty, particularly in applications where safety and reliability are paramount. In this paper, we introduce a general framework on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-29 Yu Chen , Xiangcheng Zhang , Siwei Wang , Longbo Huang