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Related papers: Sequential Decision-Making under Uncertainty: A Ro…

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Markov decision processes (MDPs) provide a standard framework for sequential decision making under uncertainty. However, MDPs do not take uncertainty in transition probabilities into account. Robust Markov decision processes (RMDPs) address…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-05-01 Krishnendu Chatterjee , Ehsan Kafshdar Goharshady , Mehrdad Karrabi , Petr Novotný , Đorđe Žikelić

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

One key challenge for multi-task Reinforcement learning (RL) in practice is the absence of task indicators. Robust RL has been applied to deal with task ambiguity, but may result in over-conservative policies. To balance the worst-case…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-25 Mengdi Xu , Peide Huang , Yaru Niu , Visak Kumar , Jielin Qiu , Chao Fang , Kuan-Hui Lee , Xuewei Qi , Henry Lam , Bo Li , Ding Zhao

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

Robust Markov decision processes (MDPs) address the challenge of model uncertainty by optimizing the worst-case performance over an uncertainty set of MDPs. In this paper, we focus on the robust average-reward MDPs under the model-free…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-19 Yue Wang , Alvaro Velasquez , George Atia , Ashley Prater-Bennette , Shaofeng Zou

We present an efficient robust value iteration for \texttt{s}-rectangular robust Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with a time complexity comparable to standard (non-robust) MDPs which is significantly faster than any existing method. We do…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-01 Navdeep Kumar , Kfir Levy , Kaixin Wang , Shie Mannor

Recursion is the fundamental paradigm to finitely describe potentially infinite objects. As state-of-the-art reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms cannot directly reason about recursion, they must rely on the practitioner's ingenuity in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-24 Ernst Moritz Hahn , Mateo Perez , Sven Schewe , Fabio Somenzi , Ashutosh Trivedi , Dominik Wojtczak

We consider risk-sensitive Markov decision processes (MDPs), where the MDP model is influenced by a parameter which takes values in a compact metric space. We identify sufficient conditions under which small perturbations in the model…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-09-28 Shiping Shao , Abhishek Gupta , William B. Haskell

Reinforcement learning (RL) has exceeded human performance in many synthetic settings such as video games and Go. However, real-world deployment of end-to-end RL models is less common, as RL models can be very sensitive to slight…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-29 Jing Dong , Jingwei Li , Baoxiang Wang , Jingzhao Zhang

This paper studies Markov Decision Processes under parameter uncertainty. We adapt the distributionally robust optimization framework, and assume that the uncertain parameters are random variables following an unknown distribution, and…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2015-05-14 Pengqian Yu , Huan Xu

Robust MDPs (RMDPs) can be used to compute policies with provable worst-case guarantees in reinforcement learning. The quality and robustness of an RMDP solution are determined by the ambiguity set---the set of plausible transition…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-21 Marek Petrik , Reazul Hasan Russell

We study non-rectangular robust Markov decision processes under the average-reward criterion, where the ambiguity set couples transition probabilities across states and the adversary commits to a stationary kernel for the entire horizon. We…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-11 Shengbo Wang , Nian Si

Robust Markov decision processes (MDPs) allow to compute reliable solutions for dynamic decision problems whose evolution is modeled by rewards and partially-known transition probabilities. Unfortunately, accounting for uncertainty in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-18 Chin Pang Ho , Marek Petrik , Wolfram Wiesemann

Robust Markov Decision Processes (RMDPs) intend to ensure robustness with respect to changing or adversarial system behavior. In this framework, transitions are modeled as arbitrary elements of a known and properly structured uncertainty…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-25 Esther Derman , Daniel Mankowitz , Timothy Mann , Shie Mannor

We propose policy gradient algorithms for robust infinite-horizon Markov decision processes (MDPs) with non-rectangular uncertainty sets, thereby addressing an open challenge in the robust MDP literature. Indeed, uncertainty sets that…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-09-30 Mengmeng Li , Daniel Kuhn , Tobias Sutter

The Robust Regularized Markov Decision Process (RRMDP) is proposed to learn policies robust to dynamics shifts by adding regularization to the transition dynamics in the value function. Existing methods mostly use unstructured…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-03 Cheng Tang , Zhishuai Liu , Pan Xu

Sequential decisions in volatile, high-stakes settings require more than maximizing expected return; they require principled uncertainty management. This paper presents the Uncertainty-Aware Markov Decision Process (UAMDP), a unified…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-19 Michal Koren , Or Peretz , Tai Dinh , Philip S. Yu

Robust Markov Decision Processes (RMDPs) generalize classical MDPs that consider uncertainties in transition probabilities by defining a set of possible transition functions. An objective is a set of runs (or infinite trajectories) of the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-08 Ali Asadi , Krishnendu Chatterjee , Ehsan Kafshdar Goharshady , Mehrdad Karrabi , Ali Shafiee

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

Robust Markov Decision Processes (RMDPs) have recently been recognized as a valuable and promising approach to discovering a policy with creditable performance, particularly in the presence of a dynamic environment and estimation errors in…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-06-04 Zhenwei Lin , Chenyu Xue , Qi Deng , Yinyu Ye