On Corruption-Robustness in Performative Reinforcement Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Pollatos, Vasilis, Mandal, Debmalya, Radanovic, Goran
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Pollatos, Vasilis
Mandal, Debmalya
Radanovic, Goran
author_facet Pollatos, Vasilis
Mandal, Debmalya
Radanovic, Goran
contents In performative Reinforcement Learning (RL), an agent faces a policy-dependent environment: the reward and transition functions depend on the agent's policy. Prior work on performative RL has studied the convergence of repeated retraining approaches to a performatively stable policy. In the finite sample regime, these approaches repeatedly solve for a saddle point of a convex-concave objective, which estimates the Lagrangian of a regularized version of the reinforcement learning problem. In this paper, we aim to extend such repeated retraining approaches, enabling them to operate under corrupted data. More specifically, we consider Huber's $ε$-contamination model, where an $ε$ fraction of data points is corrupted by arbitrary adversarial noise. We propose a repeated retraining approach based on convex-concave optimization under corrupted gradients and a novel problem-specific robust mean estimator for the gradients. We prove that our approach exhibits last-iterate convergence to an approximately stable policy, with the approximation error linear in $\sqrtε$. We experimentally demonstrate the importance of accounting for corruption in performative RL.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_05609
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle On Corruption-Robustness in Performative Reinforcement Learning
Pollatos, Vasilis
Mandal, Debmalya
Radanovic, Goran
Machine Learning
In performative Reinforcement Learning (RL), an agent faces a policy-dependent environment: the reward and transition functions depend on the agent's policy. Prior work on performative RL has studied the convergence of repeated retraining approaches to a performatively stable policy. In the finite sample regime, these approaches repeatedly solve for a saddle point of a convex-concave objective, which estimates the Lagrangian of a regularized version of the reinforcement learning problem. In this paper, we aim to extend such repeated retraining approaches, enabling them to operate under corrupted data. More specifically, we consider Huber's $ε$-contamination model, where an $ε$ fraction of data points is corrupted by arbitrary adversarial noise. We propose a repeated retraining approach based on convex-concave optimization under corrupted gradients and a novel problem-specific robust mean estimator for the gradients. We prove that our approach exhibits last-iterate convergence to an approximately stable policy, with the approximation error linear in $\sqrtε$. We experimentally demonstrate the importance of accounting for corruption in performative RL.
title On Corruption-Robustness in Performative Reinforcement Learning
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.05609