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First-Order Methods for Wasserstein Distributionally Robust MDP
Julien Grand-Clement · Christian Kroer
Abstract:
Markov decision processes (MDPs) are known to be sensitive to parameter specification. Distributionally robust MDPs alleviate this issue by allowing for \textit{ambiguity sets} which give a set of possible distributions over parameter sets. The goal is to find an optimal policy with respect to the worst-case parameter distribution. We propose a framework for solving Distributionally robust MDPs via first-order methods, and instantiate it for several types of Wasserstein ambiguity sets. By developing efficient proximal updates, our algorithms achieve a convergence rate of for the number of kernels in the support of the nominal distribution, states , and actions ; this rate varies slightly based on the Wasserstein setup. Our dependence on and is significantly better than existing methods, which have a complexity of . Numerical experiments show that our algorithm is significantly more scalable than state-of-the-art approaches across several domains.
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