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This paper studies Distributionally Robust Optimization (DRO), a fundamental framework for enhancing the robustness and generalization of statistical learning and optimization. An effective ambiguity set for DRO must involve distributions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Jiaqi Wen , Jianyi Yang

Motivated by the success of ensembles for uncertainty estimation in supervised learning, we take a renewed look at how ensembles of $Q$-functions can be leveraged as the primary source of pessimism for offline reinforcement learning (RL).…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-30 Seyed Kamyar Seyed Ghasemipour , Shixiang Shane Gu , Ofir Nachum

It is known that the set of perturbed data is key in robust optimization (RO) modelling. Distributionally robust optimization (DRO) is a methodology used for optimization problems affected by random parameters with uncertain probability…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-05-09 Yueyao Li , Wenxun Xing

Existing theoretical studies on offline reinforcement learning (RL) mostly consider a dataset sampled directly from the target task. In practice, however, data often come from several heterogeneous but related sources. Motivated by this…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-06-16 Chengshuai Shi , Wei Xiong , Cong Shen , Jing Yang

We study reinforcement learning by combining recent advances in regularized linear programming formulations with the classical theory of stochastic approximation. Motivated by the challenge of designing algorithms that leverage off-policy…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-15 Axel Friedrich Wolter , Tobias Sutter

While policy optimization algorithms have played an important role in recent empirical success of Reinforcement Learning (RL), the existing theoretical understanding of policy optimization remains rather limited -- they are either…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-05 Qinghua Liu , Gellért Weisz , András György , Chi Jin , Csaba Szepesvári

Diffusion policies have achieved superior performance in imitation learning and offline reinforcement learning (RL) due to their rich expressiveness. However, the conventional diffusion training procedure requires samples from target…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-01 Haitong Ma , Tianyi Chen , Kai Wang , Na Li , Bo Dai

In real scenarios, state observations that an agent observes may contain measurement errors or adversarial noises, misleading the agent to take suboptimal actions or even collapse while training. In this paper, we study the training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-23 Ke Sun , Yingnan Zhao , Shangling Jui , Linglong Kong

This paper proposes a novel robust reinforcement learning framework for discrete-time linear systems with model mismatch that may arise from the sim-to-real gap. A key strategy is to invoke advanced techniques from control theory. Using the…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-12-07 Leilei Cui , Tamer Başar , Zhong-Ping Jiang

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) offers an appealing approach to real-world tasks by learning policies from pre-collected datasets without interacting with the environment. However, the performance of existing offline RL algorithms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-14 Peng Cheng , Xianyuan Zhan , Zhihao Wu , Wenjia Zhang , Shoucheng Song , Han Wang , Youfang Lin , Li Jiang

Standard on-policy reinforcement learning relies on heuristic clipping to enforce trust regions, but this mechanism imposes a severe cost by indiscriminately truncating high-return yet high-divergence updates. We demonstrate that explicitly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Yu Luo , Shuo Han , Yihan Hu , Lei Lv , Huaping Liu , Fuchun Sun , Jianye Hao , Dong Li

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn decision policies from a fixed batch of logged transitions, without additional environment interaction. Despite remarkable empirical progress, offline RL remains fragile under distribution…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-03-16 Debashis Chatterjee

This paper investigates model robustness in reinforcement learning (RL) to reduce the sim-to-real gap in practice. We adopt the framework of distributionally robust Markov decision processes (RMDPs), aimed at learning a policy that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-09 Laixi Shi , Gen Li , Yuting Wei , Yuxin Chen , Matthieu Geist , Yuejie Chi

Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) agents typically learn world models by minimizing predictive loss. However, powerful RL optimizers inevitably exploit minor model inaccuracies, leading to simulator exploitation and a reality gap…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Christoph Dann , Yishay Mansour , Mehryar Mohri

Learning policies from fixed offline datasets is a key challenge to scale up reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms towards practical applications. This is often because off-policy RL algorithms suffer from distributional shift, due to…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has achieved impressive results in robotics, yet high-performing pipelines remain highly task-specific, with little reuse of prior data. Offline Model-based RL (MBRL) offers greater data efficiency by training…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-01-09 Chenhao Li , Andreas Krause , Marco Hutter

This work pioneers regret analysis of risk-sensitive reinforcement learning in partially observable environments with hindsight observation, addressing a gap in theoretical exploration. We introduce a novel formulation that integrates…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-29 Tonghe Zhang , Yu Chen , Longbo Huang

We investigate the theoretical aspects of offline reinforcement learning (RL) under general function approximation. While prior works (e.g., Xie et al., 2021) have established the theoretical foundations of learning a good policy from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Xiang Li , Yuheng Zhang , Nan Jiang

In this paper, a new population-guided parallel learning scheme is proposed to enhance the performance of off-policy reinforcement learning (RL). In the proposed scheme, multiple identical learners with their own value-functions and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-10 Whiyoung Jung , Giseung Park , Youngchul Sung

Offline policy learning is aimed at learning decision-making policies using existing datasets of trajectories without collecting additional data. The primary motivation for using reinforcement learning (RL) instead of supervised learning…