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Despite achieving excellent performance on benchmarks, deep neural networks often underperform in real-world deployment due to sensitivity to minor, often imperceptible shifts in input data, known as distributional shifts. These shifts are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-25 Birk Torpmann-Hagen , Pål Halvorsen , Michael A. Riegler , Dag Johansen

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

Despite the high performance achieved by deep neural networks on various tasks, extensive studies have demonstrated that small tweaks in the input could fail the model predictions. This issue of deep neural networks has led to a number of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-22 Ming-Chang Chiu , Xuezhe Ma

Designing reliable decision strategies for autonomous urban driving is challenging. Reinforcement learning (RL) has been used to automatically derive suitable behavior in uncertain environments, but it does not provide any guarantee on the…

Offline reinforcement learning, which seeks to utilize offline/historical data to optimize sequential decision-making strategies, has gained surging prominence in recent studies. Due to the advantage that appropriate function approximators…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-14 Ming Yin , Yaqi Duan , Mengdi Wang , Yu-Xiang Wang

The goal of inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) is to infer a reward function that explains the behavior of an agent performing a task. The assumption that most approaches make is that the demonstrated behavior is near-optimal. In many…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-20 Luis Haug , Ivan Ovinnikov , Eugene Bykovets

This paper investigates the so-called reward-balancing methods, a novel class of algorithms for solving discounted-return reinforcement learning (RL) problems. These methods consist of iteratively adjusting the reward function to transform…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-23 Simone Baroncini , Bahman Gharesifard , Giuseppe Notarstefano

While training fair machine learning models has been studied extensively in recent years, most developed methods rely on the assumption that the training and test data have similar distributions. In the presence of distribution shifts, fair…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-22 Sina Baharlouei , Meisam Razaviyayn

We propose a model-free reinforcement learning algorithm inspired by the popular randomized least squares value iteration (RLSVI) algorithm as well as the optimism principle. Unlike existing upper-confidence-bound (UCB) based approaches,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-27 Haque Ishfaq , Qiwen Cui , Viet Nguyen , Alex Ayoub , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang , Doina Precup , Lin F. Yang

In this paper, we propose and study opportunistic reinforcement learning - a new variant of reinforcement learning problems where the regret of selecting a suboptimal action varies under an external environmental condition known as the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-26 Xiaoxiao Wang , Nader Bouacida , Xueying Guo , Xin Liu

We study model-based reinforcement learning in an unknown finite communicating Markov decision process. We propose a simple algorithm that leverages a variance based confidence interval. We show that the proposed algorithm, UCRL-V, achieves…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-12 Aristide Tossou , Debabrota Basu , Christos Dimitrakakis

For highly automated driving above SAE level~3, behavior generation algorithms must reliably consider the inherent uncertainties of the traffic environment, e.g. arising from the variety of human driving styles. Such uncertainties can…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-02-08 Julian Bernhard , Stefan Pollok , Alois Knoll

We study algorithms using randomized value functions for exploration in reinforcement learning. This type of algorithms enjoys appealing empirical performance. We show that when we use 1) a single random seed in each episode, and 2) a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-14 Zhihan Xiong , Ruoqi Shen , Qiwen Cui , Maryam Fazel , Simon S. Du

Offline reinforcement learning aims to learn from pre-collected datasets without active exploration. This problem faces significant challenges, including limited data availability and distributional shifts. Existing approaches adopt a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-01 Yue Wang , Jinjun Xiong , Shaofeng Zou

A key task in Artificial Intelligence is learning effective policies for controlling agents in unknown environments to optimize performance measures. Off-policy learning methods, like Q-learning, allow learners to make optimal decisions…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Mingxuan Li , Junzhe Zhang , Elias Bareinboim

In the era of deep reinforcement learning, making progress is more complex, as the collected experience must be compressed into a deep model for future exploitation and sampling. Many papers have shown that training a deep learning policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Glen Berseth

Stochastic optimization problems often involve data distributions that change in reaction to the decision variables. This is the case for example when members of the population respond to a deployed classifier by manipulating their features…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-12-15 Dmitriy Drusvyatskiy , Lin Xiao

Decentralized machine learning often relies on outsourcing computations, such as gradient evaluations, to untrusted worker nodes. Existing robust aggregation methods can mitigate malicious behavior under honest-majority assumptions, but may…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Hanzaleh Akbari Nodehi , Parsa Moradi , Soheil Mohajer , Mohammad Ali Maddah-Ali

In most value-based reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms, the agent estimates only the expected reward for each action and selects the action with the highest reward. In contrast, Distributional Reinforcement Learning (DRL) estimates the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-20 Rijul Tandon , Peter Vamplew , Cameron Foale

This paper presents a class of new algorithms for distributed statistical estimation that exploit divide-and-conquer approach. We show that one of the key benefits of the divide-and-conquer strategy is robustness, an important…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2018-08-29 Stanislav Minsker , Nate Strawn