Model-Free Robust Average-Reward Reinforcement Learning
Yue Wang Alvaro Velasquez George Atia Ashley Prater-Bennette Shaofeng Zou
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 setting. We first theoretically characterize the structure of
solutions to the robust average-reward Bellman equation, which is essential for
our later convergence analysis. We then design two model-free algorithms,
robust relative value iteration (RVI) TD and robust RVI Q-learning, and
theoretically prove their convergence to the optimal solution. We provide
several widely used uncertainty sets as examples, including those defined by
the contamination model, total variation, Chi-squared divergence,
Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence and Wasserstein distance.