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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

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

In high-stake scenarios like medical treatment and auto-piloting, it's risky or even infeasible to collect online experimental data to train the agent. Simulation-based training can alleviate this issue, but may suffer from its inherent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-16 Jialian Li , Tongzheng Ren , Dong Yan , Hang Su , Jun Zhu

We study the risk-sensitive exponential cost MDP formulation and develop a trajectory-based gradient algorithm to find the stationary point of the cost associated with a set of parameterized policies. We derive a formula that can be used to…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-08-31 Mehrdad Moharrami , Yashaswini Murthy , Arghyadip Roy , R. Srikant

Optimal policies in Markov decision processes (MDPs) are very sensitive to model misspecification. This raises serious concerns about deploying them in high-stake domains. Robust MDPs (RMDP) provide a promising framework to mitigate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-06 Reazul Hasan Russel , Bahram Behzadian , Marek Petrik

We consider the problem of solving robust Markov decision process (MDP), which involves a set of discounted, finite state, finite action space MDPs with uncertain transition kernels. The goal of planning is to find a robust policy that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-13 Yan Li , Guanghui Lan , Tuo Zhao

In this paper, we study the non-asymptotic and asymptotic performances of the optimal robust policy and value function of robust Markov Decision Processes(MDPs), where the optimal robust policy and value function are solved only from a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-08-16 Wenhao Yang , Liangyu Zhang , Zhihua Zhang

In robust Markov decision processes (MDPs), the uncertainty in the transition kernel is addressed by finding a policy that optimizes the worst-case performance over an uncertainty set of MDPs. While much of the literature has focused on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-02 Yue Wang , Alvaro Velasquez , George Atia , Ashley Prater-Bennette , Shaofeng Zou

Markov decision processes (MDPs) is viewed as an optimization of an objective function over certain linear operators over general function spaces. A new existence result is established for the existence of optimal policies in general MDPs,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-01 Abhishek Gupta , Aditya Mahajan

The pursuit of robustness has recently been a popular topic in reinforcement learning (RL) research, yet the existing methods generally suffer from efficiency issues that obstruct their real-world implementation. In this paper, we introduce…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-15 Yang Hu , Haitong Ma , Bo Dai , Na Li

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

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

Robust Markov decision processes (MDPs) have attracted significant interest due to their ability to protect MDPs from poor out-of-sample performance in the presence of ambiguity. In contrast to classical MDPs, which account for…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-06 Chin Pang Ho , Marek Petrik , Wolfram Wiesemann

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

Learning-based approaches to verifying unknown Markov decision processes (MDPs) often employ uncertain MDPs. These models use, for example, confidence intervals to capture transition uncertainty and allow synthesis of policies that are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Yannik Schnitzer , Alessandro Abate , David Parker

Constrained decision-making is essential for designing safe policies in real-world control systems, yet simulated environments often fail to capture real-world adversities. We consider the problem of learning a policy that will maximize the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Sourav Ganguly , Kishan Panaganti , Arnob Ghosh , Adam Wierman

Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) are an effective way to formally describe many Machine Learning problems. In fact, recently MDPs have also emerged as a powerful framework to model financial trading tasks. For example, financial MDPs can…

Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science · Computer Science 2021-07-21 Diego Pino , Javier García , Fernando Fernández , Svitlana S Vyetrenko

We propose policy gradient algorithms for solving a risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RL) problem in on-policy as well as off-policy settings. We consider episodic Markov decision processes, and model the risk using the broad class of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-25 Nithia Vijayan , Prashanth L. A

In this work, we consider an online robust Markov Decision Process (MDP) where we have the information of finitely many prototypes of the underlying transition kernel. We consider an adaptively updated ambiguity set of the prototypes and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-20 Shuo Sun , Meng Qi , Zuo-Jun Max Shen

We consider Markov decision processes (MDPs) with unknown disturbance distribution and address this problem using the robust Markov decision process (RMDP) approach. We construct the empirical distribution of the unknown disturbance…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-11 Sivaramakrishnan Ramani