Non-rectangular Robust MDPs with Normed Uncertainty Sets

Navdeep Kumar, Adarsh Gupta, Maxence Mohamed ELFATIHI, Giorgia Ramponi, Kfir Y. Levy, Shie Mannor

Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 38 (NeurIPS 2025) Main Conference Track

Robust policy evaluation for non-rectangular uncertainty set is generally NP-hard, even in approximation. Consequently, existing approaches suffer from either exponential iteration complexity or significant accuracy gaps. Interestingly, we identify a powerful class of $L_p$-bounded uncertainty sets that avoid these complexity barriers due to their structural simplicity. We further show that this class can be decomposed into infinitely many \texttt{sa}-rectangular $L_p$-bounded sets and leverage its structural properties to derive a novel dual formulation for $L_p$ robust Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). This formulation reveals key insights into the adversary’s strategy and leads to the \textbf{first polynomial-time robust policy evaluation algorithm} for $L_1$-normed non-rectangular robust MDPs.