# User-Oriented Robust Reinforcement Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.07301 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.07301/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Feb 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06347/) (2017)
- [Playing Atari with Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.5602/) (2013)
- [Domain Randomization for Transferring Deep Neural Networks from Simulation to the Real World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06907/) (2017)
- [Deep Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Driving: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.00444/) (2020)
- [Robust Adversarial Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.02702/) (2017)
- [Quantifying Generalization in Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02341/) (2018)
- [Robust Deep Reinforcement Learning against Adversarial Perturbations on State Observations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08938/) (2020)
- [Action Robust Reinforcement Learning and Applications in Continuous Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.09184/) (2019)
- [Risk-Sensitive and Robust Decision-Making: a CVaR Optimization Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02188/) (2015)
- [EPOpt: Learning Robust Neural Network Policies Using Model Ensembles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.01283/) (2016)
- [Robust Reinforcement Learning on State Observations with Learned Optimal Adversary](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.08452/) (2021)
- [Generalization in Reinforcement Learning with Selective Noise Injection and Information Bottleneck](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.12911/) (2019)
- [Online Robust Reinforcement Learning with Model Uncertainty](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.14523/) (2021)
- [Efficient Model-Based Reinforcement Learning through Optimistic Policy Search and Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.08684/) (2020)
- [Reinforcement Learning with Perturbed Rewards](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.01032/) (2018)
- [One Solution is Not All You Need: Few-Shot Extrapolation via Structured MaxEnt RL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.14484/) (2020)
- [Robust Reinforcement Learning for Continuous Control with Model Misspecification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07516/) (2019)
- [Robust Deep Reinforcement Learning through Adversarial Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.01976/) (2020)
- [Wasserstein Robust Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.13196/) (2019)
- [Twice regularized MDPs and the equivalence between robustness and regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06267/) (2021)
- [Robust Reinforcement Learning via Adversarial training with Langevin Dynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.06063/) (2020)
- [Soft-Robust Actor-Critic Policy-Gradient](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.04848/) (2018)
- [Distributionally Robust Counterpart in Markov Decision Processes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1501.07418/) (2015)
- [Robust Inverse Reinforcement Learning under Transition Dynamics Mismatch](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01174/) (2020)
- [Robust Policy Gradient against Strong Data Corruption](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05800/) (2021)
- [Spatiotemporally Constrained Action Space Attacks on Deep Reinforcement Learning Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.02583/) (2019)
- [Improved Corruption Robust Algorithms for Episodic Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.06875/) (2021)
- [First-Order Methods for Wasserstein Distributionally Robust MDP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.06790/) (2020)
- [Combining Pessimism with Optimism for Robust and Efficient Model-Based Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10369/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recently, improving the robustness of policies across different environments attracts increasing attention in the reinforcement learning (RL) community. Existing robust RL methods mostly aim to achieve the max-min robustness by optimizing the policy's performance in the worst-case environment. However, in practice, a user that uses an RL policy may have different preferences over its performance across environments. Clearly, the aforementioned max-min robustness is oftentimes too conservative to satisfy user preference. Therefore, in this paper, we integrate user preference into policy learning in robust RL, and propose a novel User-Oriented Robust RL (UOR-RL) framework. Specifically, we define a new User-Oriented Robustness (UOR) metric for RL, which allocates different weights to the environments according to user preference and generalizes the max-min robustness metric. To optimize the UOR metric, we develop two different UOR-RL training algorithms for the scenarios with or without a priori known environment distribution, respectively. Theoretically, we prove that our UOR-RL training algorithms converge to near-optimal policies even with inaccurate or completely no knowledge about the environment distribution. Furthermore, we carry out extensive experimental evaluations in 4 MuJoCo tasks. The experimental results demonstrate that UOR-RL is comparable to the state-of-the-art baselines under the average and worst-case performance metrics, and more importantly establishes new state-of-the-art performance under the UOR metric.