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Markov decision processes (MDPs) are the defacto frame-work for sequential decision making in the presence ofstochastic uncertainty. A classical optimization criterion forMDPs is to maximize the expected discounted-sum pay-off, which…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-02-28 Tomas Brazdil , Krishnendu Chatterjee , Petr Novotny , Jiri Vahala

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn policies that satisfy certain constraints before deploying them to safety-critical applications. Previous primal-dual style approaches suffer from instability issues and lack optimality…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-20 Zuxin Liu , Zhepeng Cen , Vladislav Isenbaev , Wei Liu , Zhiwei Steven Wu , Bo Li , Ding Zhao

Considering non-stationary environments in online optimization enables decision-maker to effectively adapt to changes and improve its performance over time. In such cases, it is favorable to adopt a strategy that minimizes the negative…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-04-05 Siyi Wang , Zifan Wang , Xinlei Yi , Michael M. Zavlanos , Karl H. Johansson , Sandra Hirche

The use of Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents in practical applications requires the consideration of suboptimal outcomes, depending on the familiarity of the agent with its environment. This is especially important in safety-critical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-07 Frederik Schubert , Theresa Eimer , Bodo Rosenhahn , Marius Lindauer

We introduce a novel class of algorithms to efficiently approximate the unknown return distributions in policy evaluation problems from distributional reinforcement learning (DRL). The proposed distributional dynamic programming algorithms…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-07-22 Julian Gerstenberg , Ralph Neininger , Denis Spiegel

Learning a predictive model of the mean return, or value function, plays a critical role in many reinforcement learning algorithms. Distributional reinforcement learning (DRL) has been shown to improve performance by modeling the value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Ju-Seung Byun , Andrew Perrault

Safety in reinforcement learning (RL) is a key property in both training and execution in many domains such as autonomous driving or finance. In this paper, we formalize it with a constrained RL formulation in the distributional RL setting.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-01 Jianyi Zhang , Paul Weng

Distributionally robust policy learning aims to find a policy that performs well under the worst-case distributional shift, and yet most existing methods for robust policy learning consider the worst-case joint distribution of the covariate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Jingyuan Wang , Zhimei Ren , Ruohan Zhan , Zhengyuan Zhou

In domains such as finance, healthcare, and robotics, managing worst-case scenarios is critical, as failure to do so can lead to catastrophic outcomes. Distributional Reinforcement Learning (DRL) provides a natural framework to incorporate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Mehrdad Moghimi , Hyejin Ku

Although in recent years reinforcement learning has become very popular the number of successful applications to different kinds of operations research problems is rather scarce. Reinforcement learning is based on the well-studied dynamic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-03 Manuel Schneckenreither

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

Distributional reinforcement learning (RL) -- in which agents learn about all the possible long-term consequences of their actions, and not just the expected value -- is of great recent interest. One of the most important affordances of a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-11-15 Chris Gagne , Peter Dayan

We develop an approach for solving time-consistent risk-sensitive stochastic optimization problems using model-free reinforcement learning (RL). Specifically, we assume agents assess the risk of a sequence of random variables using dynamic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-01 Anthony Coache , Sebastian Jaimungal

In this paper, we study the distributionally robust joint chance constrained Markov decision process. {Utilizing the logarithmic transformation technique,} we derive its deterministic reformulation with bi-convex terms under the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-01-03 Tian Xia , Jia Liu , Zhiping Chen

This work studies discrete-time discounted Markov decision processes with continuous state and action spaces and addresses the inverse problem of inferring a cost function from observed optimal behavior. We first consider the case in which…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-05-27 Angeliki Kamoutsi , Peter Schmitt-Förster , Tobias Sutter , Volkan Cevher , John Lygeros

We propose a novel framework to solve risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RL) problems where the agent optimises time-consistent dynamic spectral risk measures. Based on the notion of conditional elicitability, our methodology constructs…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-02 Anthony Coache , Sebastian Jaimungal , Álvaro Cartea

In this work we present a novel approach to hierarchical reinforcement learning for linearly-solvable Markov decision processes. Our approach assumes that the state space is partitioned, and the subtasks consist in moving between the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Guillermo Infante , Anders Jonsson , Vicenç Gómez

Modern navigation algorithms based on deep reinforcement learning (RL) show promising efficiency and robustness. However, most deep RL algorithms operate in a risk-neutral manner, making no special attempt to shield users from relatively…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-12 Jinyoung Choi , Christopher R. Dance , Jung-eun Kim , Seulbin Hwang , Kyung-sik Park

Route planning is essential to mobile robot navigation problems. In recent years, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has been applied to learning optimal planning policies in stochastic environments without prior knowledge. However, existing…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-04-21 Xi Lin , Paul Szenher , John D. Martin , Brendan Englot

We address the problem of inverse reinforcement learning in Markov decision processes where the agent is risk-sensitive. In particular, we model risk-sensitivity in a reinforcement learning framework by making use of models of human…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-11-23 Lillian J. Ratliff , Eric Mazumdar