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Stochastic and soft optimal policies resulting from entropy-regularized Markov decision processes (ER-MDP) are desirable for exploration and imitation learning applications. Motivated by the fact that such policies are sensitive with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-03 Tien Mai , Patrick Jaillet

Policy gradient methods have become a standard for training reinforcement learning agents in a scalable and efficient manner. However, they do not account for transition uncertainty, whereas learning robust policies can be computationally…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-12 Navdeep Kumar , Esther Derman , Matthieu Geist , Kfir Levy , Shie Mannor

We consider large-scale Markov decision processes (MDPs) with parameter uncertainty, under the robust MDP paradigm. Previous studies showed that robust MDPs, based on a minimax approach to handle uncertainty, can be solved using dynamic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-06-27 Aviv Tamar , Huan Xu , Shie Mannor

Markov decision processes (MDPs) are known to be sensitive to parameter specification. Distributionally robust MDPs alleviate this issue by allowing for \emph{ambiguity sets} which give a set of possible distributions over parameter sets.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-05-05 Julien Grand-Clément , Christian Kroer

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

We consider a robust approach to address uncertainty in model parameters in Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), which are widely used to model dynamic optimization in many applications. Most prior works consider the case where the uncertainty…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-09-02 Vineet Goyal , Julien Grand-Clément

Markov decision processes (MDPs) are a standard model for sequential decision-making problems and are widely used across many scientific areas, including formal methods and artificial intelligence (AI). MDPs do, however, come with the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-12-11 Marnix Suilen , Thom Badings , Eline M. Bovy , David Parker , Nils Jansen

Robust Markov decision processes (MDPs) provide a general framework to model decision problems where the system dynamics are changing or only partially known. Efficient methods for some \texttt{sa}-rectangular robust MDPs exist, using its…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-10-06 Navdeep Kumar , Kfir Levy , Kaixin Wang , Shie Mannor

Policy Mirror Descent (PMD) stands as a versatile algorithmic framework encompassing several seminal policy gradient algorithms such as natural policy gradient, with connections with state-of-the-art reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-07 Kimon Protopapas , Anas Barakat

Many real-world decision-making problems face the off-dynamics challenge: the agent learns a policy in a source domain and deploys it in a target domain with different state transitions. The distributionally robust Markov decision process…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-26 Zhishuai Liu , Pan Xu

Partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) model specific environments in sequential decision-making under uncertainty. Critically, optimal policies for POMDPs may not be robust against perturbations in the environment.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-08-21 Maris F. L. Galesloot , Roman Andriushchenko , Milan Češka , Sebastian Junges , Nils Jansen

We consider risk-sensitive Markov decision processes (MDPs), where the MDP model is influenced by a parameter which takes values in a compact metric space. We identify sufficient conditions under which small perturbations in the model…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-09-28 Shiping Shao , Abhishek Gupta , William B. Haskell

We propose policy gradient algorithms for robust infinite-horizon Markov decision processes (MDPs) with non-rectangular uncertainty sets, thereby addressing an open challenge in the robust MDP literature. Indeed, uncertainty sets that…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-09-30 Mengmeng Li , Daniel Kuhn , Tobias Sutter

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

Robust Markov decision processes (RMDPs) provide a promising framework for computing reliable policies in the face of model errors. Many successful reinforcement learning algorithms build on variations of policy-gradient methods, but…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-15 Qiuhao Wang , Chin Pang Ho , Marek Petrik

Policy Mirror Descent (PMD) is a general family of algorithms that covers a wide range of novel and fundamental methods in reinforcement learning. Motivated by the instability of policy iteration (PI) with inexact policy evaluation, PMD…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-11-23 Emmeran Johnson , Ciara Pike-Burke , Patrick Rebeschini

Markov decision processes (MDPs) are formal models commonly used in sequential decision-making. MDPs capture the stochasticity that may arise, for instance, from imprecise actuators via probabilities in the transition function. However, in…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-06-21 Marnix Suilen , Thiago D. Simão , David Parker , Nils Jansen

Online planning in Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) enables agents to make sequential decisions by simulating future trajectories from the current state, making it well-suited for large-scale or dynamic environments. Sample-based methods…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Tamir Shazman , Idan Lev-Yehudi , Ron Benchetit , Vadim Indelman

We study the sample complexity of obtaining an $\epsilon$-optimal policy in \emph{Robust} discounted Markov Decision Processes (RMDPs), given only access to a generative model of the nominal kernel. This problem is widely studied in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-07 Pierre Clavier , Erwan Le Pennec , Matthieu Geist

Mirror descent (MD), a well-known first-order method in constrained convex optimization, has recently been shown as an important tool to analyze trust-region algorithms in reinforcement learning (RL). However, there remains a considerable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-08 Manan Tomar , Lior Shani , Yonathan Efroni , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh