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We study the regret guarantee for risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RSRL) via distributional reinforcement learning (DRL) methods. In particular, we consider finite episodic Markov decision processes whose objective is the entropic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-26 Hao Liang , Zhi-Quan Luo

We study reinforcement learning under model misspecification, where we do not have access to the true environment but only to a reasonably close approximation to it. We address this problem by extending the framework of robust MDPs to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-11-10 Aurko Roy , Huan Xu , Sebastian Pokutta

Meta-reinforcement learning (meta-RL) aims to learn from multiple training tasks the ability to adapt efficiently to unseen test tasks. Despite the success, existing meta-RL algorithms are known to be sensitive to the task distribution…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-02 Zichuan Lin , Garrett Thomas , Guangwen Yang , Tengyu Ma

Ensuring the robustness of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) agents against adversarial attacks is critical for their trustworthy deployment. Recent research highlights the challenges of achieving state-adversarial robustness and suggests…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Haoran Li , Zicheng Zhang , Wang Luo , Congying Han , Jiayu Lv , Tiande Guo , Yudong Hu

We study off-dynamics Reinforcement Learning (RL), where the policy is trained on a source domain and deployed to a distinct target domain. We aim to solve this problem via online distributionally robust Markov decision processes (DRMDPs),…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-26 Zhishuai Liu , Pan Xu

This paper establishes a rigorous connection between regularized discrete-time reinforcement learning (RL) and continuous-time stochastic optimal control. Specifically, classical RL algorithms are typically solving a regularized…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-24 Huyên Pham , Yuming Paul Zhang , Yuhua Zhu

We describe a new approach for managing aleatoric uncertainty in the Reinforcement Learning (RL) paradigm. Instead of selecting actions according to a single statistic, we propose a distributional method based on the second-order stochastic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-08 John D. Martin , Michal Lyskawinski , Xiaohu Li , Brendan Englot

Distributional reinforcement learning (DRL) studies the evolution of full return distributions under Bellman updates rather than focusing on expected values. A classical result is that the distributional Bellman operator is contractive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Keru Wang , Yixin Deng , Yao Lyu , Stephen Redmond , Shengbo Eben Li

Reinforcement Learning (RL) remains a central optimisation framework in machine learning. Although RL agents can converge to optimal solutions, the definition of ``optimality'' depends on the environment's statistical properties. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Bert Verbruggen , Arne Vanhoyweghen , Vincent Ginis

A common goal in statistics and machine learning is to learn models that can perform well against distributional shifts, such as latent heterogeneous subpopulations, unknown covariate shifts, or unmodeled temporal effects. We develop and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-07-21 John Duchi , Hongseok Namkoong

We study reinforcement learning (RL) with linear function approximation where the underlying transition probability kernel of the Markov decision process (MDP) is a linear mixture model (Jia et al., 2020; Ayoub et al., 2020; Zhou et al.,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-08 Dongruo Zhou , Quanquan Gu , Csaba Szepesvari

In domains such as finance, healthcare, and robotics, managing worst-case scenarios is critical, as failure to do so can lead to catastrophic outcomes. Distributional Reinforcement Learning (DRL) provides a natural framework to incorporate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Mehrdad Moghimi , Hyejin Ku

We consider reinforcement learning (RL) in episodic Markov decision processes (MDPs) with linear function approximation under drifting environment. Specifically, both the reward and state transition functions can evolve over time but their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-16 Huozhi Zhou , Jinglin Chen , Lav R. Varshney , Ashish Jagmohan

We propose a novel framework for risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RSRL) that incorporates robustness against transition uncertainty. We define two distinct yet coupled risk measures: an inner risk measure addressing state and cost…

Risk Management · Quantitative Finance 2026-01-01 Shanyu Han , Yangbo He , Yang Liu

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) has shown remarkable success in specific offline decision-making scenarios, yet its theoretical guarantees are still under development. Existing works on offline RL theory primarily emphasize a few trivial…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-20 Di Wu , Yuling Jiao , Li Shen , Haizhao Yang , Xiliang Lu

We investigate the adaptive robust control framework for portfolio optimization and loss-based hedging under drift and volatility uncertainty. Adaptive robust problems offer many advantages but require handling a double optimization problem…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-05-06 Tao Chen , Michael Ludkovski

Model-based reinforcement learning (RL) is considered to be a promising approach to reduce the sample complexity that hinders model-free RL. However, the theoretical understanding of such methods has been rather limited. This paper…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-16 Yuping Luo , Huazhe Xu , Yuanzhi Li , Yuandong Tian , Trevor Darrell , Tengyu Ma

We propose a novel distributionally robust $Q$-learning algorithm for the non-tabular case accounting for continuous state spaces where the state transition of the underlying Markov decision process is subject to model uncertainty. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Chung I Lu , Julian Sester , Aijia Zhang

We consider the problem of learning-based man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks in cyber-physical systems (CPS), and extend our previously proposed Bellman Deviation Detection (BDD) framework for model-free reinforcement learning (RL). We refine…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-04-02 Rishi Rani , Massimo Franceschetti

We study risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RL) based on an entropic risk measure in episodic non-stationary Markov decision processes (MDPs). Both the reward functions and the state transition kernels are unknown and allowed to vary…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-22 Yuhao Ding , Ming Jin , Javad Lavaei