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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

Markov decisions processes (MDPs) are becoming increasing popular as models of decision theoretic planning. While traditional dynamic programming methods perform well for problems with small state spaces, structured methods are needed for…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2013-01-30 Jesse Hoey , Robert St-Aubin , Alan Hu , Craig Boutilier

Robust reinforcement learning (RL) under the average-reward criterion is essential for long-term decision-making, particularly when the environment may differ from its specification. However, a significant gap exists in understanding the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-26 Zachary Roch , Chi Zhang , George Atia , Yue Wang

We study the problem of learning optimal policies in finite-horizon Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) using low-rank reinforcement learning (RL) methods. In finite-horizon MDPs, the policies, and therefore the value functions (VFs) are not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Sergio Rozada , Jose Luis Orejuela , Antonio G. Marques

Reinforcement learning is a framework for interactive decision-making with incentives sequentially revealed across time without a system dynamics model. Due to its scaling to continuous spaces, we focus on policy search where one…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-04 Amrit Singh Bedi , Anjaly Parayil , Junyu Zhang , Mengdi Wang , Alec Koppel

We consider the expressivity of Markov rewards in sequential decision making under uncertainty. We view reward functions in Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) as a means to characterize desired behaviors of agents. Assuming desired behaviors…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-07-25 Shuwa Miura

The Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) is a complex optimization problem with numerous real-world applications, mostly solved using metaheuristic algorithms due to its $\mathcal{NP}$-Hard nature. Traditionally, these metaheuristics rely on…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-08-11 Bachtiar Herdianto , Romain Billot , Flavien Lucas , Marc Sevaux

This paper introduces MDP homomorphic networks for deep reinforcement learning. MDP homomorphic networks are neural networks that are equivariant under symmetries in the joint state-action space of an MDP. Current approaches to deep…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-21 Elise van der Pol , Daniel E. Worrall , Herke van Hoof , Frans A. Oliehoek , Max Welling

Markov decision processes capture sequential decision making under uncertainty, where an agent must choose actions so as to optimize long term reward. The paper studies efficient reasoning mechanisms for Relational Markov Decision Processes…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2011-11-02 Chenggang Wang , Saket Joshi , Roni Khardon

This paper studies the computation of robust deterministic policies for Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) in the Lightning Does Not Strike Twice (LDST) model of Mannor, Mebel and Xu (ICML '12). In this model, designed to provide robustness…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-12-18 Fei Wu , Erik Demeulemeester , Jannik Matuschke

Reinforcement learning (RL) in Markov decision processes (MDPs) with large state spaces is a challenging problem. The performance of standard RL algorithms degrades drastically with the dimensionality of state space. However, in practice,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-06-21 Kamyar Azizzadenesheli , Alessandro Lazaric , Animashree Anandkumar

Markov decision processes (MDPs) provide a standard framework for sequential decision making under uncertainty. However, MDPs do not take uncertainty in transition probabilities into account. Robust Markov decision processes (RMDPs) address…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-05-01 Krishnendu Chatterjee , Ehsan Kafshdar Goharshady , Mehrdad Karrabi , Petr Novotný , Đorđe Žikelić

This paper focuses on finding reinforcement learning policies for control systems with hard state and action constraints. Despite its success in many domains, reinforcement learning is challenging to apply to problems with hard constraints,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-24 Liyuan Zheng , Yuanyuan Shi , Lillian J. Ratliff , Baosen Zhang

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

Machine learning problems have an intrinsic geometric structure as central objects including a neural network's weight space and the loss function associated with a particular task can be viewed as encoding the intrinsic geometry of a given…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-08 Guruprasad Raghavan , Matt Thomson

The concept of robustness of regulatory networks has been closely related to the nature of the interactions among genes, and the capability of pattern maintenance or reproducibility. Defining this robustness property is a challenging task,…

Molecular Networks · Quantitative Biology 2007-10-24 Madalena Chave , Eduardo D. Sontag , Anirvan M. Sengupta

Many applications -- including power systems, robotics, and economics -- involve a dynamical system interacting with a stochastic and hard-to-model environment. We adopt a reinforcement learning approach to control such systems.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-08-26 Abed AlRahman Al Makdah , Oliver Kosut , Lalitha Sankar , Shaofeng Zou

In this paper we investigate the tractability of robust Markov Decision Processes (RMDPs) under various structural assumptions on the uncertainty set. Surprisingly, we show that in all generality (i.e. without any assumption on the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-11-14 Julien Grand-Clément , Nian Si , Shengbo Wang

To overcome the curses of dimensionality and modeling of Dynamic Programming (DP) methods to solve Markov Decision Process (MDP) problems, Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods are adopted in practice. Contrary to traditional RL algorithms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-24 Arghyadip Roy , Vivek Borkar , Abhay Karandikar , Prasanna Chaporkar

A novel reinforcement learning scheme to synthesize policies for continuous-space Markov decision processes (MDPs) is proposed. This scheme enables one to apply model-free, off-the-shelf reinforcement learning algorithms for finite MDPs to…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-03-03 Abolfazl Lavaei , Fabio Somenzi , Sadegh Soudjani , Ashutosh Trivedi , Majid Zamani