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Reinforcement Learning (RL) has achieved remarkable success in sequential decision tasks. However, recent studies have revealed the vulnerability of RL policies to different perturbations, raising concerns about their effectiveness and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Buqing Nie , Yangqing Fu , Jingtian Ji , Yue Gao

Empirical researchers and decision-makers spanning various domains frequently seek profound insights into the long-term impacts of interventions. While the significance of long-term outcomes is undeniable, an overemphasis on them may…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-17 Peng Wu , Ziyu Shen , Feng Xie , Zhongyao Wang , Chunchen Liu , Yan Zeng

Despite the success achieved by the analysis of supervised learning algorithms in the framework of statistical mechanics, reinforcement learning has remained largely untouched. Here we move towards closing the gap by analyzing the dynamics…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2022-09-02 Riccardo Fabbricatore , Vladimir V. Palyulin

Safety is a primary concern when applying reinforcement learning to real-world control tasks, especially in the presence of external disturbances. However, existing safe reinforcement learning algorithms rarely account for external…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-12 Zeyang Li , Chuxiong Hu , Shengbo Eben Li , Jia Cheng , Yunan Wang

Learning from raw high dimensional data via interaction with a given environment has been effectively achieved through the utilization of deep neural networks. Yet the observed degradation in policy performance caused by imperceptible…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-19 Ezgi Korkmaz

Policy gradient methods are among the most effective methods in challenging reinforcement learning problems with large state and/or action spaces. However, little is known about even their most basic theoretical convergence properties,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-16 Alekh Agarwal , Sham M. Kakade , Jason D. Lee , Gaurav Mahajan

We consider the problem of sequentially making decisions that are rewarded by "successes" and "failures" which can be predicted through an unknown relationship that depends on a partially controllable vector of attributes for each instance.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-09-18 Yingfei Wang , Chu Wang , Warren Powell

Policy learning algorithms are widely used in areas such as personalized medicine and advertising to develop individualized treatment regimes. However, most methods force a decision even when predictions are uncertain, which is risky in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Ayush Sawarni , Jikai Jin , Justin Whitehouse , Vasilis Syrgkanis

Training models that perform well under distribution shifts is a central challenge in machine learning. In this paper, we introduce a modeling framework where, in addition to training data, we have partial structural knowledge of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-28 Tobias Sutter , Andreas Krause , Daniel Kuhn

The regression discontinuity (RD) design is widely used for program evaluation with observational data. The primary focus of the existing literature has been the estimation of the local average treatment effect at the existing treatment…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-09-05 Yi Zhang , Eli Ben-Michael , Kosuke Imai

We study offline reinforcement learning in average-reward MDPs, which presents increased challenges from the perspectives of distribution shift and non-uniform coverage, and has been relatively underexamined from a theoretical perspective.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-23 Matthew Zurek , Guy Zamir , Yudong Chen

We consider the off-policy evaluation (OPE) problem in contextual bandits, where the goal is to estimate the value of a target policy using the data collected by a logging policy. Most popular approaches to the OPE are variants of the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-08-20 Sutanoy Dasgupta , Yabo Niu , Kishan Panaganti , Dileep Kalathil , Debdeep Pati , Bani Mallick

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

Seeking to improve model generalization, we consider a new approach based on distributionally robust learning (DRL) that applies stochastic gradient descent to the outer minimization problem. Our algorithm efficiently estimates the gradient…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-12-24 Soumyadip Ghosh , Mark Squillante

Integrative analysis of multiple datasets for estimating optimal individualized treatment rules (ITRs) can enhance decision efficiency. A central challenge is posterior shift, wherein the conditional distribution of potential outcomes given…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-09 Wenhai Cui , Wen Su , Xingqiu Zhao

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

In safety-critical applications, machine learning models should generalize well under worst-case distribution shifts, that is, have a small robust risk. Invariance-based algorithms can provably take advantage of structural assumptions on…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-02-06 Julia Kostin , Nicola Gnecco , Fanny Yang

Exploration and adaptation to new tasks in a transfer learning setup is a central challenge in reinforcement learning. In this work, we build on the idea of modeling a distribution over policies in a Bayesian deep reinforcement learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-11 Disha Shrivastava , Eeshan Gunesh Dhekane , Riashat Islam

Distribution shifts are ubiquitous in real-world machine learning applications, posing a challenge to the generalization of models trained on one data distribution to another. We focus on scenarios where data distributions vary across…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-06-05 Steven Wilkins-Reeves , Xu Chen , Qi Ma , Christine Agarwal , Aude Hofleitner

Under covariate shift, training (source) data and testing (target) data differ in input space distribution, but share the same conditional label distribution. This poses a challenging machine learning task. Robust Bias-Aware (RBA)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-01-01 Anqi Liu , Rizal Fathony , Brian D. Ziebart