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In data-driven optimization, sample average approximation (SAA) is known to suffer from the so-called optimizer's curse that causes an over-optimistic evaluation of the solution performance. We argue that a special type of distributionallly…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-10-13 Zhenyuan Liu , Bart P. G. Van Parys , Henry Lam

We consider stochastic programs where the distribution of the uncertain parameters is only observable through a finite training dataset. Using the Wasserstein metric, we construct a ball in the space of (multivariate and non-discrete)…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2017-06-14 Peyman Mohajerin Esfahani , Daniel Kuhn

We propose an adjusted Wasserstein distributionally robust estimator -- based on a nonlinear transformation of the Wasserstein distributionally robust (WDRO) estimator in statistical learning. The classic WDRO estimator is asymptotically…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-05-13 Yiling Xie , Xiaoming Huo

Learning conditional densities and identifying factors that influence the entire distribution are vital tasks in data-driven applications. Conventional approaches work mostly with summary statistics, and are hence inadequate for a…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-09-13 Chengliang Tang , Nathan Lenssen , Ying Wei , Tian Zheng

Standard rare-event simulation techniques require exact distributional specifications, which limits their effectiveness in the presence of distributional uncertainty. To address this, we develop a novel framework for estimating rare-event…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-01-06 Dohyun Ahn , Huiyi Chen , Lewen Zheng

We investigate the problem of synthesizing distributionally robust control policies for stochastic systems under safety and reach-avoid specifications. Using a game-theoretical framework, we consider the setting where the probability…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-11-04 Yu Chen , Yuda Li , Shaoyuan Li , Xiang Yin

We introduce Wasserstein Policy Optimization (WPO), an actor-critic algorithm for reinforcement learning in continuous action spaces. WPO can be derived as an approximation to Wasserstein gradient flow over the space of all policies…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-02 David Pfau , Ian Davies , Diana Borsa , Joao G. M. Araujo , Brendan Tracey , Hado van Hasselt

This brief note aims to introduce the recent paradigm of distributional robustness in the field of shape and topology optimization. Acknowledging that the probability law of uncertain physical data is rarely known beyond a rough…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-01-13 Charles Dapogny , Franck Iutzeler , Andrea Meda , Boris Thibert

Reinforcement learning algorithms, though successful, tend to over-fit to training environments hampering their application to the real-world. This paper proposes $\text{W}\text{R}^{2}\text{L}$ -- a robust reinforcement learning algorithm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-18 Mohammed Amin Abdullah , Hang Ren , Haitham Bou Ammar , Vladimir Milenkovic , Rui Luo , Mingtian Zhang , Jun Wang

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

The Wasserstein distance has emerged as a key metric to quantify distances between probability distributions, with applications in various fields, including machine learning, control theory, decision theory, and biological systems.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Eduardo Figueiredo , Steven Adams , Luca Laurenti

Robust Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) address environmental shift through distributionally robust optimization (DRO) by finding an optimal worst-case policy within an uncertainty set of transition kernels. However, standard DRO approaches…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-10 Akram S. Awad , Shihab Ahmed , Yue Wang , George K. Atia

In this work, we develop a novel data-driven Bayesian nonparametric Wasserstein distributionally robust optimization (BNWDRO) framework for decision-making under uncertainty. The proposed framework unifies a Bayesian nonparametric method…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-11-07 Chao Ning , Xutao Ma

Wasserstein distributionally robust control (DRC) recently emerges as a principled paradigm for handling uncertainty in stochastic dynamical systems. However, it constructs data-driven ambiguity sets via uniform distribution shifts before…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-14 Jingyi Wu , Chao Ning , Yang Shi

We use distributionally-robust optimization for machine learning to mitigate the effect of data poisoning attacks. We provide performance guarantees for the trained model on the original data (not including the poison records) by training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-30 Farhad Farokhi

We propose REpresentation-Aware Distributionally Robust Estimation (READ), a novel framework for Wasserstein distributionally robust learning that accounts for predictive representations when guarding against distributional shifts. Unlike…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-09-12 Zitao Wang , Nian Si , Molei Liu

We propose a distributionally robust data-driven predictive control framework for stochastic linear time-invariant systems with unknown dynamics and disturbance distributions. We use an offline trajectory to fit the subspace predictive…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-05-11 Mirhan Urkmez , Shahab Heshmati-Alamdari

We study the infinite-horizon distributionally robust (DR) control of linear systems with quadratic costs, where disturbances have unknown, possibly time-correlated distribution within a Wasserstein-2 ambiguity set. We aim to minimize the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-06-12 Taylan Kargin , Joudi Hajar , Vikrant Malik , Babak Hassibi

We consider a distributionally robust second-order stochastic dominance constrained optimization problem. We require the dominance constraints hold with respect to all probability distributions in a Wasserstein ball centered at the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-10-20 Yu Mei , Jia Liu , Zhiping Chen

Data-driven Distributionally Robust Optimization (DD-DRO) via optimal transport has been shown to encompass a wide range of popular machine learning algorithms. The distributional uncertainty size is often shown to correspond to the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-05-12 Jose Blanchet , Yang Kang , Fan Zhang , Fei He , Zhangyi Hu