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We consider a reinforcement learning setting in which the deployment environment is different from the training environment. Applying a robust Markov decision processes formulation, we extend the distributionally robust $Q$-learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-02 Shengbo Wang , Nian Si , Jose Blanchet , Zhengyuan Zhou

Distributional reinforcement learning (DRL) enhances the understanding of the effects of the randomness in the environment by letting agents learn the distribution of a random return, rather than its expected value as in standard RL. At the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-03-27 Zifan Wang , Yulong Gao , Siyi Wang , Michael M. Zavlanos , Alessandro Abate , Karl H. Johansson

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

In dynamic programming (DP) and reinforcement learning (RL), an agent learns to act optimally in terms of expected long-term return by sequentially interacting with its environment modeled by a Markov decision process (MDP). More generally…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-03 Mastane Achab , Gergely Neu

This monograph develops a comprehensive statistical learning framework that is robust to (distributional) perturbations in the data using Distributionally Robust Optimization (DRO) under the Wasserstein metric. Beginning with fundamental…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-08-23 Ruidi Chen , Ioannis Ch. Paschalidis

We present a reinforcement learning (RL) approach for robust optimisation of risk-aware performance criteria. To allow agents to express a wide variety of risk-reward profiles, we assess the value of a policy using rank dependent expected…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-16 Sebastian Jaimungal , Silvana Pesenti , Ye Sheng Wang , Hariom Tatsat

Robust reinforcement learning (RL) is to find a policy that optimizes the worst-case performance over an uncertainty set of MDPs. In this paper, we focus on model-free robust RL, where the uncertainty set is defined to be centering at a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-29 Yue Wang , Shaofeng Zou

To mitigate the limitation that the classical reinforcement learning (RL) framework heavily relies on identical training and test environments, Distributionally Robust RL (DRRL) has been proposed to enhance performance across a range of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-09-24 Zhipeng Liang , Xiaoteng Ma , Jose Blanchet , Jiheng Zhang , Zhengyuan Zhou

A major challenge of reinforcement learning (RL) in real-world applications is the variation between environments, tasks or clients. Meta-RL (MRL) addresses this issue by learning a meta-policy that adapts to new tasks. Standard MRL methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-03 Ido Greenberg , Shie Mannor , Gal Chechik , Eli Meirom

We propose a framework for distributed robust statistical learning on {\em big contaminated data}. The Distributed Robust Learning (DRL) framework can reduce the computational time of traditional robust learning methods by several orders of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-02-10 Jiashi Feng , Huan Xu , Shie Mannor

In real-world tasks, reinforcement learning (RL) agents frequently encounter situations that are not present during training time. To ensure reliable performance, the RL agents need to exhibit robustness against worst-case situations. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-19 Sebastian Curi , Ilija Bogunovic , Andreas Krause

Distributional reinforcement learning (DRL) enhances the understanding of the effects of the randomness in the environment by letting agents learn the distribution of a random return, rather than its expected value as in standard…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-03-26 Zifan Wang , Yulong Gao , Siyi Wang , Michael M. Zavlanos , Alessandro Abate , Karl H. Johansson

In many real-world settings, reinforcement learning systems suffer performance degradation when the environment encountered at deployment differs from that observed during training. Distributionally robust reinforcement learning (DR-RL)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Debamita Ghosh , George K. Atia , Yue Wang

Risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RL) is crucial for maintaining reliable performance in high-stakes applications. While traditional RL methods aim to learn a point estimate of the random cumulative cost, distributional RL (DRL) seeks…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-03 Minheng Xiao , Xian Yu , Lei Ying

Several works have addressed the problem of incorporating constraints in the reinforcement learning (RL) framework, however majority of them can only guarantee the satisfaction of soft constraints. In this work, we address the problem of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-16 Kwangyeon Kim , Akshita Gupta , Hong-Cheol Choi , Inseok Hwang

We investigate reinforcement learning (RL) in the presence of distributional mismatch between training and deployment, where policies trained in simulators often underperform in practice due to mismatches between training and deployment…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-12 Debamita Ghosh , George K. Atia , Yue Wang

Statistical learning under distribution shift is challenging when neither prior knowledge nor fully accessible data from the target distribution is available. Distributionally robust learning (DRL) aims to control the worst-case statistical…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-12-19 Yu Gui , Rina Foygel Barber , Cong Ma

Distributionally robust offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to find a policy that performs the best under the worst environment within an uncertainty set using an offline dataset collected from a nominal model. While recent advances in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-07 Ruiquan Huang , Yingbin Liang , Jing Yang

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

Robust reinforcement learning (RL) aims to find a policy that optimizes the worst-case performance in the face of uncertainties. In this paper, we focus on action robust RL with the probabilistic policy execution uncertainty, in which,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-21 Guanlin Liu , Zhihan Zhou , Han Liu , Lifeng Lai