Decision-Making under Uncertainty
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18 papers in the last four weeks, up 200% on the four weeks before. 0.2% of all new papers.
Latest papers 139
Organizations routinely make strategic budget allocations under operational constraints, but often lack a principled way to assess whether realized allocations were close to the best feasible choices in hindsight. We present a retrospective auditing framework based on hindsight regret, defined as the opportunity cost of the realized allocation relative to a constraint-faithful benchmark under the same budget and stability guardrails. The framework estimates regime-specific spend--response functions from historical logs, computes feasible hindsight allocations via constrained optimization, and propagates uncertainty through Monte Carlo evaluation to produce regret distributions, expected lift, and probability-of-improvement summaries. This separates allocation inefficiency from uncertainty in the estimated response surfaces. Experiments on real marketing allocation logs show that the framework yields interpretable post-hoc diagnostics and reveals a practical trade-off between allocation flexibility and detectability: moderate feasible reallocations often capture most measurable gain, while larger shifts move into weak-support regions with higher uncertainty. The result is a practical method for auditing historical budget decisions when online experimentation is costly or infeasible.
Dynamic UGV-UAV Cooperative Path Planning in Uncertain Environments
This paper addresses the Dynamic UGV-UAV Cooperative Path Planning (DUCPP) problem involving one unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) assisted by one or more unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) operating on an uncertain road network with potentially impassable edges. DUCPP is particularly relevant for scenarios such as disaster response, emergency supply transport, and rescue operations, where a UGV must reach a specified destination in the presence of partially unknown road conditions. To enable the UGV to travel safely and efficiently to its destination, the UAV(s) dynamically inspect edges in the environment to identify and prune damaged or impassable edges from consideration. We present multiple strategies, including a bidirectional approach, to optimize UGV-UAV cooperation for finding a safe path in an uncertain road network. Furthermore, we explore the impact of using multiple UAVs on reducing the UGV's travel time, and evaluate the associated computation time. The proposed strategies are implemented and evaluated on 100 urban road networks. The results demonstrate that the bidirectional strategy achieves the best performance in most instances, and using multiple UAVs further reduces UGV travel time at the expense of increased computation time. This paper presents a robust framework for DUCPP to achieve efficient UGV-UAV cooperation for path planning and inspection, offering practical solutions for navigation in challenging and uncertain conditions.
Credal Concept Bottleneck Models for Epistemic-Aleatoric Uncertainty Decomposition
Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) predict through human-interpretable concepts, but they typically output point concept probabilities that conflate epistemic uncertainty (reducible model underspecification) with aleatoric uncertainty (irreducible input ambiguity). This makes concept-level uncertainty hard to interpret and, more importantly, hard to act upon. We introduce CREDENCE (Credal Ensemble Concept Estimation), a CBM framework that decomposes concept uncertainty by construction. CREDENCE represents each concept as a credal prediction (a probability interval), derives epistemic uncertainty from disagreement across diverse concept heads, and estimates aleatoric uncertainty via a dedicated ambiguity output trained to match annotator disagreement when available. The resulting signals support prescriptive decisions: automate low-uncertainty cases, prioritize data collection for high-epistemic cases, route high-aleatoric cases to human review, and abstain when both are high. Across several tasks, we show that epistemic uncertainty is positively associated with prediction errors, whereas aleatoric uncertainty closely tracks annotator disagreement, providing guidance beyond error correlation. Our implementation is available at the following link: https://github.com/Tankiit/Credal_Sets/tree/ensemble-credal-cbm
Fairness under uncertainty in sequential decisions
Fair machine learning (ML) methods help identify and mitigate the risk that algorithms encode or automate social injustices. Algorithmic approaches alone cannot resolve structural inequalities, but they can support socio-technical decision systems by surfacing discriminatory biases, clarifying trade-offs, and enabling governance. Although fairness is well studied in supervised learning, many real ML applications are online and sequential, with prior decisions informing future ones. Each decision is taken under uncertainty due to unobserved counterfactuals and finite samples, with dire consequences for under-represented groups, systematically under-observed due to historical exclusion and selective feedback. A bank cannot know whether a denied loan would have been repaid, and may have less data on marginalized populations. This paper introduces a taxonomy of uncertainty in sequential decision-making -- model, feedback, and prediction uncertainty -- providing shared vocabulary for assessing systems where uncertainty is unevenly distributed across groups. We formalize model and feedback uncertainty via counterfactual logic and reinforcement learning, and illustrate harms to decision makers (unrealized gains/losses) and subjects (compounding exclusion, reduced access) of policies that ignore the unobserved space. Algorithmic examples show it is possible to reduce outcome variance for disadvantaged groups while preserving institutional objectives (e.g. expected utility). Experiments on data simulated with varying bias show how unequal uncertainty and selective feedback produce disparities, and how uncertainty-aware exploration alters fairness metrics. The framework equips practitioners to diagnose, audit, and govern fairness risks. Where uncertainty drives unfairness rather than incidental noise, accounting for it is essential to fair and effective decision-making.
A Field Guide to Decision Making
High-consequence decision making demands peak performance from individuals in positions of responsibility. Such executive authority bears the obligation to act despite uncertainty, limited resources, time constraints, and accountability risks. Tools and strategies to motivate confidence and foster risk tolerance must confront informational noise and can provide qualified accountability. Machine intelligence augments human cognition and perception to improve situational awareness, decision framing, flexibility, and coherence through agentic stewardship of contextual metadata. We examine systemic and behavioral factors crucial to address in scenarios encumbered by complexity, uncertainty, and urgency.
Robust Out-of-Distribution Stochastic Optimization
Data-driven decision-making under uncertainty typically presumes the collection of historical data from an unknown target probability distribution. However, one may have no access to any data from the target distribution prior to decision-making. To address this challenge, we propose robust out-of-distribution stochastic optimization, a novel data-driven framework that effectively utilizes relevant data distributions for robust decision-making under unseen distributions. A key feature of our framework is that all data distributions are assumed to be randomly generated from a meta-distribution over distributions. To describe uncertainty in distribution generation, we propose to learn a data-driven uncertainty set in a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) from relevant data distributions, with adjustable conservatism. We then incorporate this set into a min-max stochastic program to derive robust decisions. Notably, under randomness of distribution generation, we establish rigorous out-of-distribution generalization guarantees for the uncertainty set as well as the solution. To ease problem-solving in RKHS, an approximate parametrization with a provably bounded suboptimality and a row generation strategy are presented. Extensive numerical experiments on multi-item newsvendor and portfolio optimization demonstrate the superior out-of-distribution performance of our decision-making framework under unseen data distribution, even when only a small or moderate number of relevant sources are available.
Deep Learning for Sequential Decision Making under Uncertainty: Foundations, Frameworks, and Frontiers
Artificial intelligence (AI) is moving increasingly beyond prediction to support decisions in complex, uncertain, and dynamic environments. This shift creates a natural intersection with operations research and management science (OR/MS), which has long provided methodological foundations for sequential decision making under uncertainty. At the same time, deep learning advances, including feedforward neural networks, recurrent architectures, transformers, large language models (LLMs), and deep reinforcement learning, have expanded data-driven modeling for large-scale decisions. This tutorial presents an OR/MS-centered perspective on deep learning for sequential decision making under uncertainty, bridging neural architectures and OR/MS approaches to decision making. Its premise: deep learning complements optimization rather than replacing it. Deep learning brings adaptability and scalable approximation, whereas OR/MS provides the mathematical rigor to represent constraints, recourse, uncertainty, and decision quality. The tutorial reviews key decision making foundations, connects them to the major neural architectures in modern AI, and organizes the field around three central themes: predict-then-optimize and decision-aware learning, learning-based decision generation under constraints for continuous and discrete problems with temporal coupling, and deep reinforcement learning for sequential and combinatorial decision making. Impact spans supply chains, service systems, healthcare and epidemic response, agriculture, energy, environmental sustainability, and autonomous operations. This tutorial frames these developments as part of a shift from predictive AI toward decision-capable AI, highlighting OR/MS's role in shaping the next generation of integrated learning--optimization systems.
Safe RLHF Beyond Expectation: Stochastic Dominance for Universal Spectral Risk Control
Safe Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) typically enforces safety through expected cost constraints, but the expectation captures only a single statistic of the cost distribution and fails to account for distributional uncertainty, particularly under heavy tails or rare catastrophic events. This limitation is problematic when robustness and risk sensitivity are critical. Stochastic dominance offers a principled alternative by comparing entire cost distributions rather than just their averages, enabling direct control over tail risks and potential out-of-distribution failures that expectation-based constraints may overlook. In this work, we propose Risk-sensitive Alignment via Dominance (RAD), a novel alignment framework that replaces scalar expected cost constraints with First-Order Stochastic Dominance (FSD) constraints. We operationalize this constraint by comparing the target policy's cost distribution to that of a reference policy within an Optimal Transport (OT) framework, using entropic regularization and Sinkhorn iterations to obtain a differentiable and computationally efficient objective for stable end-to-end optimization. Furthermore, we introduce quantile-weighted FSD constraints and show that weighted FSD universally controls a broad class of Spectral Risk Measures (SRMs), so that improvements under weighted dominance imply guaranteed improvements in the corresponding spectral risk. This provides a principled mechanism for tuning a model's risk profile via the quantile weighting function. Empirical results demonstrate that RAD improves harmlessness over baselines while remaining competitive in helpfulness, and exhibits greater robustness on out-of-distribution harmlessness evaluations.
What Capable Agents Must Know: Selection Theorems for Robust Decision-Making under Uncertainty
As artificial agents become increasingly capable, what internal structure is necessary for an agent to act competently under uncertainty? Classical results show that optimal control can be implemented using belief states or world models, but not that such representations are required. We prove quantitative "selection theorems" showing that strong task performance (low average-case regret) forces world models, belief-like memory and -- under task mixtures -- persistent regime-tracking variables resembling functional primitives of emotion, along with informational modularity under block-structured tasks. Our results cover stochastic policies, partial observability, and evaluation under task distributions, without assuming optimality, determinism, or access to an explicit model. Technically, we reduce predictive modeling to binary "betting" decisions and show that regret bounds limit probability mass on suboptimal bets, enforcing the predictive distinctions needed to separate high-margin outcomes. In fully observed settings, this yields approximate recovery of the interventional transition kernel; under partial observability, it implies necessity of predictive state and belief-like memory, addressing an open question in prior world-model recovery work.
Uncertainty-aware Causal Decision Making via Effect Bound Decomposition
Causal inference from observational data can provide strong evidence for finding the best action in a decision-making scenario without having to perform expensive randomized trials. The causal effect of an action is often not pointwise identifiable even with infinite data due to unobserved confounding factors. Furthermore, having only finitely many samples adds another layer of uncertainty to causal effect estimation. Several existing methods can be used to obtain upper and lower bounds to the causal effect, ranging from symbolic methods to the more recent neural network-based approaches, which implicitly incorporate both sources of uncertainty. However, these methods do not inform whether collecting more samples may or may not help identify the best action from observational data, leaving experts in the dark about their data collection strategies. We address this problem with a novel framework that can distinguish the range of causal effect values that might be eliminated by collecting more samples from the range of values that, with high probability, cannot be eliminated with more observational samples. We show that this partitioning can be obtained by solving max-min and min-max optimization problems. We leverage neural causal models to approximately recover this decomposition in practice. We demonstrate via experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets that our algorithm can determine when collecting more samples will not help determine the best action. Our framework can help practitioners decide when to resort to non-observational studies or seek to measure some of the unmeasured confounders for optimal decision-making.
People use fast and flat simulation to reason about new games
Games have long been a microcosm for studying planning and reasoning in both natural and artificial intelligence (AI), often focusing on expert-level or even super-human play. But real life also pushes human intelligence along a different frontier, requiring people to flexibly navigate decision-making problems that they have never thought about before. Here, we use novice gameplay to study how people reason about new problem settings. Through a series of large-scale behavioral studies with over 1000 participants and 121 two-player strategic board games (almost all novel to our participants), we show that people are systematic and adaptively rational in how they play a game for the first time, or evaluate a game (e.g., how fair or how fun it is likely to be) before they have played it even once. We explain these capacities via a computational cognitive model that we call the 'Intuitive Gamer', a model based on mechanisms of fast and flat (depth-limited) goal-directed probabilistic simulation. Our work offers new insights into how people rapidly evaluate, act, and make suggestions when encountering novel problems, and could inform the design of more flexible and human-like AI systems that can determine not just how to solve new tasks, but whether a task is worth thinking about at all.
Meta-learning ecological priors from large language models explains human learning and decision making
Human cognition is profoundly shaped by the environments in which it unfolds. Yet, it remains an open question whether learning and decision making can be explained as a principled adaptation to the statistical structure of real-world tasks. We introduce ecologically rational analysis, a computational framework that unifies the normative foundations of rational analysis with ecological grounding. Leveraging large language models to generate ecologically valid cognitive tasks at scale, and using meta-learning to derive rational models optimized for these environments, we develop a new class of learning algorithms: Ecologically Rational Meta-learned Inference (ERMI). ERMI internalizes the statistical regularities of naturalistic problem spaces and adapts flexibly to novel situations, without requiring hand-crafted heuristics or explicit parameter updates. We show that ERMI captures human behavior across 15 experiments spanning function learning, category learning, and decision making, outperforming several established cognitive models in trial-by-trial prediction. Our results suggest that much of human cognition may reflect adaptive alignment to the ecological structure of the problems we encounter in everyday life.
The price of uncertainty for social consensus
How hard is it to achieve consensus in a social network under uncertainty? In this paper we model this problem as a social graph of agents where each vertex is initially colored red or blue. The goal of the agents is to achieve consensus, which is when the colors of all agents align. Agents attempt to do this locally through steps in which an agent changes their color to the color of the majority of their neighbors. In real life, agents may not know exactly how many of their neighbors are red or blue, which introduces uncertainty into this process. Modeling uncertainty as perturbations of relative magnitude to these color neighbor counts, we show that even small values of greatly hinder the ability to achieve consensus in a social network. We prove theoretically tight upper and lower bounds on the price of uncertainty, a metric defined in previous work by Balcan et al. to quantify the effect of uncertainty in network games.
Sequential Cohort Selection under Uncertainty
We study the problem of fair cohort selection under uncertainty, motivated by university admissions where applicant outcomes are only partially observed. We consider both a one-shot setting, where a fixed policy is applied to a population, and a sequential setting, where policies are updated over time using data from previous admission years. We propose a policy optimization framework that combines probabilistic modeling of outcomes with policy gradient methods, supporting both logistic and neural network policies. In the sequential setting, the approach jointly updates the policy and the underlying models to adapt to evolving applicant populations. Experiments on a simulator grounded in real admission data show that adaptive policies substantially outperform static baselines in term of expected utility, especially under higher admission costs. Neural policies consistently achieve higher utility and adapt more effectively than simpler models, while maintaining favorable fairness properties over time. Our results demonstrate the importance of adaptivity and model expressiveness for decision-making under uncertainty.
Rethinking Prospect Theory for LLMs: Revealing the Instability of Decision-Making under Epistemic Uncertainty
Real-world decision-making often involves uncertainty expressed in linguistic rather than numerical terms, and Prospect Theory (PT) provides a classic framework for modeling human behavior under such uncertainty. Although recent studies have developed frameworks to estimate PT parameters for Large Language Models (LLMs), few have examined whether PT itself adequately describes LLM decision-making behavior. To address these gaps, we develop a streamlined workflow grounded in a classic behavioral economics experimental paradigm. First, we estimate PT parameters and evaluate how well the resulting model captures LLM decision-making behavior. We then derive probability mappings for epistemic markers in the same context and inject them into prompts to examine the stability of PT parameters under linguistic uncertainty. Our findings suggest that PT does not consistently provide a reliable account of LLM decision-making across models, and that its application to LLMs is likely sensitive to epistemic uncertainty. The findings caution against the deployment of PT-based frameworks in real-world applications where epistemic ambiguity is prevalent, giving valuable insights in behaviour interpretation and future alignment direction for LLM decision-making.
Sufficient Decision Proxies for Decision-Focused Learning
When solving optimization problems under uncertainty with contextual data, utilizing machine learning to predict the uncertain parameters' values is a popular and effective approach. Decision-focused learning (DFL) aims at learning a predictive model such that decision quality, instead of prediction accuracy, is maximized. Common practice is to predict a single scenario representing the uncertain parameters, implicitly assuming that there exists a deterministic problem approximation (proxy) that allows for optimal decision-making. The opposite has also been considered, where the underlying distribution is estimated with a parameterized distribution. However, little is known about when either choice is valid. This paper investigates for the first time problem properties that justify using a certain decision proxy. Using this, we present alternative decision proxies for DFL, with little or no compromise on the complexity of the learning task. We show the effectiveness of presented approaches in experiments on continuous and discrete problems, as well as problems with uncertainty in the objective function and in the constraints.
Plan-Driven Adaptive Bidding for First-Price Auctions with Budget Constraints under Nonstationarity
We study budget pacing in repeated first-price auctions when an advertiser's private-value distributions change over time and the stationary competing-bid distribution is unknown. We ask how a feasible expenditure plan should enter online bid shading, learning, and hard budget control. We establish a plan-to-performance decomposition for a plan-driven projected-dual policy. The policy uses any feasible expenditure plan as a soft target, learns an unknown stationary competing-bid CDF from thresholds revealed after each auction, and enforces the campaign budget on every sample path. Against a distribution-informed expected-budget fluid benchmark, the uniform-plan reward gap is , where measures heterogeneity in private-value distributions. With a supplied feasible plan, the global gap decomposes into a one-sided fixed-plan execution term and a plan-mismatch term bounded by . The same analysis provides guarantees for strict and relaxed period-cap comparators, exact recovery of the global benchmark under a specific allowance vector, and separate lower bounds establishing the necessity of the temporal-heterogeneity and Plan Error terms. An upstream planner can translate forecasts or managerial priorities into a feasible spending trajectory, while the online controller adapts bids using realized thresholds and expenditures. The guarantee is modular: it evaluates the final normalized or projected plan through . A specific forecasting model can be linked to the guarantee by establishing how its primitive estimation errors propagate to this plan-quality metric.
Active Exploration via Autoregressive Generation of Missing Data
We pose uncertainty quantification and exploration in online decision-making as a problem of training and generation from an autoregressive sequence model, an area experiencing rapid innovation. Our approach rests on viewing uncertainty as arising from missing future outcomes that could be revealed through action choices, rather than from unobservable latent parameters of the environment. This reformulation aligns naturally with modern machine learning capabilities: we can i) train generative models through next-outcome prediction rather than fit explicit priors, ii) assess uncertainty through autoregressive generation rather than sampling latent parameters from posteriors, and iii) adapt to new information by extending the sequence model's context rather than explicit posterior updating. Our main theoretical result establishes a reduction from online decision-making to offline next-outcome prediction: Bayesian regret is controlled directly by the sequence model's offline prediction loss, without requiring an explicit latent-variable posterior. Experiments, including a semi-synthetic news recommendation task, show that autoregressive generation produces calibrated epistemic uncertainty and enables effective exploration by using article text as prior information to focus exploration on resolving remaining uncertainties.
Double Fuzzy Probabilistic Interval Linguistic Term Set and a Dynamic Fuzzy Decision Making Model based on Markov Process with tts Application in Multiple Criteria Group Decision Making
The probabilistic linguistic term has been proposed to deal with probability distributions in provided linguistic evaluations. However, because it has some fundamental defects, it is often difficult for decision-makers to get reasonable information of linguistic evaluations for group decision making. In addition, weight information plays a significant role in dynamic information fusion and decision making process. However, there are few research methods to determine the dynamic attribute weight with time. In this paper, I propose the concept of double fuzzy probability interval linguistic term set (DFPILTS). Firstly, fuzzy semantic integration, DFPILTS definition, its preference relationship, some basic algorithms and aggregation operators are defined. Then, a fuzzy linguistic Markov matrix with its network is developed. Then, a weight determination method based on distance measure and information entropy to reducing the inconsistency of DFPILPR and obtain collective priority vector based on group consensus is developed. Finally, an aggregation-based approach is developed, and an optimal investment case from a financial risk is used to illustrate the application of DFPILTS and decision method in multi-criteria decision making.