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Fueled by advances in both robust optimization theory and reinforcement learning (RL), robust Markov Decision Processes (RMDPs) have garnered increasing attention due to their powerful capability for sequential decision-making under…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-07-08 Wenfan Ou , Sheng Bi

In robust Markov decision processes (RMDPs), it is assumed that the reward and the transition dynamics lie in a given uncertainty set. By targeting maximal return under the most adversarial model from that set, RMDPs address performance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-13 Uri Gadot , Esther Derman , Navdeep Kumar , Maxence Mohamed Elfatihi , Kfir Levy , Shie Mannor

We propose and study a general framework for regularized Markov decision processes (MDPs) where the goal is to find an optimal policy that maximizes the expected discounted total reward plus a policy regularization term. The extant…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-10-22 Xiang Li , Wenhao Yang , Zhihua Zhang

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

Robust Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) and risk-sensitive MDPs are both powerful tools for making decisions in the presence of uncertainties. Previous efforts have aimed to establish their connections, revealing equivalences in specific…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-05-27 Runyu Zhang , Yang Hu , Na Li

Several applications of Reinforcement Learning suffer from instability due to high variance. This is especially prevalent in high dimensional domains. Regularization is a commonly used technique in machine learning to reduce variance, at…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-04-12 Pierre Thodoroff , Audrey Durand , Joelle Pineau , Doina Precup

The distributionally robust Markov Decision Process (MDP) approach asks for a distributionally robust policy that achieves the maximal expected total reward under the most adversarial distribution of uncertain parameters. In this paper, we…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2018-10-10 Zhi Chen , Pengqian Yu , William B. Haskell

We present an efficient robust value iteration for \texttt{s}-rectangular robust Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with a time complexity comparable to standard (non-robust) MDPs which is significantly faster than any existing method. We do…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-01 Navdeep Kumar , Kfir Levy , Kaixin Wang , Shie Mannor

The Robust Markov Decision Process (RMDP) framework focuses on designing control policies that are robust against the parameter uncertainties due to the mismatches between the simulator model and real-world settings. An RMDP problem is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-17 Kishan Panaganti , Dileep Kalathil

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

We study robust Markov decision processes (RMDPs) with non-rectangular uncertainty sets, which capture interdependencies across states unlike traditional rectangular models. While non-rectangular robust policy evaluation is generally…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-02-14 Navdeep Kumar , Adarsh Gupta , Maxence Mohamed Elfatihi , Giorgia Ramponi , Kfir Yehuda Levy , Shie Mannor

Decision-making under distribution shift is a central challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), where training and deployment environments differ. We study this problem through the lens of robust Markov decision processes (RMDPs), which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-17 Jingwen Gu , Yiting He , Zhishuai Liu , Pan Xu

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

Regular Decision Processes (RDPs) are a recently introduced model that extends MDPs with non-Markovian dynamics and rewards. The non-Markovian behavior is restricted to depend on regular properties of the history. These can be specified…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-03-03 Eden Abadi , Ronen I. Brafman

Regularization of control policies using entropy can be instrumental in adjusting predictability of real-world systems. Applications benefiting from such approaches range from, e.g., cybersecurity, which aims at maximal unpredictability, to…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-02-18 Menno van Zutphen , Giannis Delimpaltadakis , Maurice Heemels , Duarte Antunes

A basic model in sequential decision making is the Markov decision process (MDP), which is extended to Robust MDPs (RMDPs) by allowing uncertainty in transition probabilities and optimizing against the worst-case transition probabilities…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Ali Asadi , Krishnendu Chatterjee , Alipasha Montaseri , Ali Shafiee

Long-term fairness is an important factor of consideration in designing and deploying learning-based decision systems in high-stake decision-making contexts. Recent work has proposed the use of Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) to formulate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-25 Eric Yang Yu , Zhizhen Qin , Min Kyung Lee , Sicun Gao

We study the relation between different Markov Decision Process (MDP) frameworks in the machine learning and econometrics literatures, including the standard MDP, the entropy and general regularized MDP, and stochastic MDP, where the latter…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-08-19 Tien Mai , Patrick Jaillet

Markov decision processes (MDPs) are used to model a wide variety of applications ranging from game playing over robotics to finance. Their optimal policy typically maximizes the expected sum of rewards given at each step of the decision…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-26 Maximilian Nägele , Jan Olle , Thomas Fösel , Remmy Zen , Florian Marquardt

We present a new geometric interpretation of Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with a natural normalization procedure that allows us to adjust the value function at each state without altering the advantage of any action with respect to any…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-06 Arsenii Mustafin , Aleksei Pakharev , Alex Olshevsky , Ioannis Ch. Paschalidis