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Related papers: Robust Reward Placement under Uncertainty

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Online advertising has motivated interest in online selection problems. Displaying ads to the right users benefits both the platform (e.g., via pay-per-click) and the advertisers (by increasing their reach). In practice, not all users click…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-08-16 Sebastian Perez-Salazar , Mohit Singh , Alejandro Toriello

We consider the challenge of finding a deterministic policy for a Markov decision process that uniformly (in all states) maximizes one reward subject to a probabilistic constraint over a different reward. Existing solutions do not fully…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-21 Jaeyoung Lee , Sean Sedwards , Krzysztof Czarnecki

Robust reinforcement learning (RL) under the average-reward criterion is essential for long-term decision-making, particularly when the environment may differ from its specification. However, a significant gap exists in understanding the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-26 Zachary Roch , Chi Zhang , George Atia , Yue Wang

In this paper, we focus on the problem of robustifying reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms with respect to model uncertainties. Indeed, in the framework of model-based RL, we propose to merge the theory of constrained Markov decision…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-13 Reazul Hasan Russel , Mouhacine Benosman , Jeroen Van Baar

We study the problem of Distributionally Robust Constrained RL (DRC-RL), where the goal is to maximize the expected reward subject to environmental distribution shifts and constraints. This setting captures situations where training and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-25 Zhengfei Zhang , Kishan Panaganti , Laixi Shi , Yanan Sui , Adam Wierman , Yisong Yue

Reinforcement learning (RL) methods learn optimal decisions in the presence of a stationary environment. However, the stationary assumption on the environment is very restrictive. In many real world problems like traffic signal control,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-08 Sindhu Padakandla , Prabuchandran K. J , Shalabh Bhatnagar

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

In Reinforcement Learning (abbreviated as RL), an agent interacts with the environment via a set of possible actions, and a reward is generated from some unknown distribution. The task here is to find an optimal set of actions such that the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-21 Aditi Anand , Suman Banerjee , Dildar Ali

We study reinforcement learning in stochastic path (SP) problems. The goal in these problems is to maximize the expected sum of rewards until the agent reaches a terminal state. We provide the first regret guarantees in this general problem…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-18 Christoph Dann , Chen-Yu Wei , Julian Zimmert

We study the problem of deploying a fleet of mobile robots to service tasks that arrive stochastically over time and at random locations in an environment. This is known as the Dynamic Vehicle Routing Problem (DVRP) and requires robots to…

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved remarkable success, yet its deployment in real-world scenarios is often limited by vulnerability to environmental uncertainties. Distributionally robust RL (DR-RL) algorithms have been proposed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Mingxuan Cui , Duo Zhou , Yuxuan Han , Grani A. Hanasusanto , Qiong Wang , Huan Zhang , Zhengyuan Zhou

Reinforcement learning often uses neural networks to solve complex control tasks. However, neural networks are sensitive to input perturbations, which makes their deployment in safety-critical environments challenging. This work lifts…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-20 Manuel Wendl , Lukas Koller , Tobias Ladner , Matthias Althoff

In this work, we provide theoretical guarantees for reward decomposition in deterministic MDPs. Reward decomposition is a special case of Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning, that allows one to learn many policies in parallel and combine…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-03-14 Tom Zahavy , Avinatan Hasidim , Haim Kaplan , Yishay Mansour

In the stochastic knapsack problem, we are given a knapsack of size B, and a set of jobs whose sizes and rewards are drawn from a known probability distribution. However, we know the actual size and reward only when the job completes. How…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2011-02-21 Anupam Gupta , Ravishankar Krishnaswamy , Marco Molinaro , R. Ravi

In this paper we are interested in the task of searching and tracking multiple moving targets in a bounded surveillance area with a group of autonomous mobile agents. More specifically, we assume that targets can appear and disappear at…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-02-02 Savvas Papaioannou , Panayiotis Kolios , Theocharis Theocharides , Christos G. Panayiotou , Marios M. Polycarpou

Exploration in complex domains is a key challenge in reinforcement learning, especially for tasks with very sparse rewards. Recent successes in deep reinforcement learning have been achieved mostly using simple heuristic exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-03-07 Joshua Achiam , Shankar Sastry

This paper concerns the central issues of model robustness and sample efficiency in offline reinforcement learning (RL), which aims to learn to perform decision making from history data without active exploration. Due to uncertainties and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-01 Laixi Shi , Yuejie Chi

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

The policy gradient method enjoys the simplicity of the objective where the agent optimizes the cumulative reward directly. Moreover, in the continuous action domain, parameterized distribution of action distribution allows easy control of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-16 Md Masudur Rahman , Yexiang Xue

While most approaches to the problem of Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) focus on estimating a reward function that best explains an expert agent's policy or demonstrated behavior on a control task, it is often the case that such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-01 Dexter R. R. Scobee , S. Shankar Sastry