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In this paper, we study the problem of estimating uniformly well the mean values of several distributions given a finite budget of samples. If the variance of the distributions were known, one could design an optimal sampling strategy by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-07-17 Alexandra Carpentier , Alessandro Lazaric , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Rémi Munos , Peter Auer , András Antos

Trustworthy machine learning aims at combating distributional uncertainties in training data distributions compared to population distributions. Typical treatment frameworks include the Bayesian approach, (min-max) distributionally robust…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-05 Shixiong Wang , Haowei Wang , Xinke Li , Jean Honorio

Moment-based distributionally robust optimization (DRO) provides an optimization framework to integrate statistical information with traditional optimization approaches. Under this framework, one assumes that the underlying joint…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-11-01 Shiyi Jiang , Jianqiang Cheng , Kai Pan , Zuo-Jun Max Shen

Off-policy evaluation and learning (OPE/L) use offline observational data to make better decisions, which is crucial in applications where online experimentation is limited. However, depending entirely on logged data, OPE/L is sensitive to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-19 Nathan Kallus , Xiaojie Mao , Kaiwen Wang , Zhengyuan Zhou

While distributional reinforcement learning (DistRL) has been empirically effective, the question of when and why it is better than vanilla, non-distributional RL has remained unanswered. This paper explains the benefits of DistRL through…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-26 Kaiwen Wang , Kevin Zhou , Runzhe Wu , Nathan Kallus , Wen Sun

We study a sequential mechanism design problem in which a principal seeks to elicit truthful reports from multiple rational agents while starting with no prior knowledge of agents' beliefs. We introduce Distributionally Robust Adaptive…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-04-22 Qiushi Han , David Simchi-Levi , Renfei Tan , Zishuo Zhao

In this paper, we consider a distributionally robust resource planning model inspired by a real-world service industry problem. In this problem, there is a mixture of known demand and uncertain future demand. Prior to having full knowledge…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-07-07 Ben Black , Russell Ainslie , Trivikram Dokka , Christopher Kirkbride

Decision-making under distribution shift is a central challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), where training and deployment environments differ. We study this problem through the lens of robust Markov decision processes (RMDPs), which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-17 Jingwen Gu , Yiting He , Zhishuai Liu , Pan Xu

Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) has become crucial for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human intent. However, existing offline RLHF approaches suffer from overoptimization, where language models degrade by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-20 Sharan Sahu , Martin T. Wells

Empirical risk minimization often performs poorly when the distribution of the target domain differs from those of source domains. To address such potential distribution shifts, we develop an unsupervised domain adaptation approach that…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-03-25 Zhenyu Wang , Peter Bühlmann , Zijian Guo

We review distributionally robust optimization (DRO), a principled approach for constructing statistical estimators that hedge against the impact of deviations in the expected loss between the training and deployment environments. Many…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-01-29 Jose Blanchet , Jiajin Li , Sirui Lin , Xuhui Zhang

We study a family of loss functions named label-distributionally robust (LDR) losses for multi-class classification that are formulated from distributionally robust optimization (DRO) perspective, where the uncertainty in the given label…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-29 Dixian Zhu , Yiming Ying , Tianbao Yang

Federated learning (FL) faces critical challenges, particularly in heterogeneous environments where non-independent and identically distributed data across clients can lead to unfair and inefficient model performance. In this work, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Mounssif Krouka , Chaouki Ben Issaid , Mehdi Bennis

Determining what experience to generate to best facilitate learning (i.e. exploration) is one of the distinguishing features and open challenges in reinforcement learning. The advent of distributed agents that interact with parallel…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-17 Tom Schaul , Diana Borsa , David Ding , David Szepesvari , Georg Ostrovski , Will Dabney , Simon Osindero

Stochastic multi-armed bandits (MABs) provide a fundamental reinforcement learning model to study sequential decision making in uncertain environments. The upper confidence bounds (UCB) algorithm gave birth to the renaissance of bandit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-11 Ambrus Tamás , Szabolcs Szentpéteri , Balázs Csanád Csáji

Standard deep reinforcement learning (DRL) aims to maximize expected reward, considering collected experiences equally in formulating a policy. This differs from human decision-making, where gains and losses are valued differently and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-17 Jared Markowitz , Ryan W. Gardner , Ashley Llorens , Raman Arora , I-Jeng Wang

Recently, (Blanchet, Kang, and Murhy 2016, and Blanchet, and Kang 2017) showed that several machine learning algorithms, such as square-root Lasso, Support Vector Machines, and regularized logistic regression, among many others, can be…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-02-25 Jose Blanchet , Yang Kang , Fan Zhang , Karthyek Murthy

We present a distributionally robust optimization (DRO) approach for the transmission expansion planning problem, considering both long- and short-term uncertainties on the system demand and non-dispatchable renewable generation. On the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-03-17 Alexandre Velloso , David Pozo , Alexandre Street

We consider optimal decision-making problems in an uncertain environment. In particular, we consider the case in which the distribution of the input is unknown, yet there is abundant historical data drawn from the distribution. In this…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2014-10-03 Zizhuo Wang , Peter Glynn , Yinyu Ye

We consider a two-stage distributionally robust optimization (DRO) model with multimodal uncertainty, where both the mode probabilities and uncertainty distributions could be affected by the first-stage decisions. To address this setting,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-03 Xian Yu , Beste Basciftci