Decision-Making under Uncertainty

Ask about this topic

Overview

Decision-making under uncertainty studies how agents should choose actions when outcomes, states, preferences, or even the governing model are imperfectly known. Common approaches include Bayesian beliefs and partially observable Markov decision processes for sequential learning, robust optimization for misspecified distributions, risk-sensitive criteria such as CVaR, and conformal methods that calibrate when to act, gather information, or abstain. These methods are tested in settings such as autonomous driving and robotics, clinical diagnosis, energy and supply-chain scheduling, finance, and human–AI interaction. A central tension is that better-calibrated or more conservative uncertainty estimates do not automatically improve decisions: methods must balance safety and tail risk against utility, computational cost, and the value of additional information.

Latest papers

CardsList

203 papers24 papers in the last four weeks, up 26% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

  1. Efficient Policy Learning with Hybrid Evaluation-Based Genetic Programming for Uncertain Agile Earth Observation Satellite Scheduling

    Mar 9, 2026Junhua Xue, Yuning Chen, Mingyan Shao +3Genetic ProgrammingAutomated Heuristic Design

  2. Sequential Service Region Design with Capacity-Constrained Investment and Spillover Effect

    Mar 9, 2026Tingting Chen, Feng Chu, Jiantong ZhangSequential Decision MakingDecision-Making under Uncertainty

    School of Economics and Management, Tongji University, Shanghai, 200092, China · Laboratoire IBISC, Univ-Evry, Université Paris-Saclay, Evry, 91000, France

  3. Risk-Aware Rulebooks for Multi-Objective Trajectory Evaluation under Uncertainty

    Mar 4, 2026Tichakorn WongpiromsarnRisk-Aware Path PlanningDecision-Making under Uncertainty

    Department of Computer Science, Iowa State University, Ames, IA 50010

  4. What Capable Agents Must Know: Selection Theorems for Robust Decision-Making under Uncertainty

    Mar 3, 2026Aran NayebiWorld ModelsDecision-Making under Uncertainty

    Machine Learning Department and Neuroscience & Robotics Institutes, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA

  5. When Alpha Breaks: Two-Level Uncertainty for Safe Deployment of Cross-Sectional Stock Rankers

    Feb 24, 2026Ursina SanderinkQuantitative FinanceDecision-Making under Uncertainty

  6. A Dynamic Survey of Soft Set Theory and Its Extensions

    Feb 24, 2026Takaaki Fujita, Florentin SmarandacheDecision-Making under Uncertainty

  7. POMDPPlanners: Open-Source Package for POMDP Planning

    Feb 24, 2026Yaacov Pariente, Vadim IndelmanPartially Observable Markov Decision ProcessesDecision-Making under Uncertainty

    Faculty of Mathematics, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa 3200003, Israel · Stephen B. Klein Faculty of Aerospace Engineering, Faculty of Data and Decision Sciences, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa 3200003, Israel

  8. Wasserstein Distributionally Robust Online Learning

    Feb 23, 2026Guixian Chen, Salar Fattahi, Soroosh ShafieeDistributionally Robust OptimizationDecision-Making under Uncertainty

    University of Michigan · Cornell University

  9. Calibrate-Then-Act: Cost-Aware Exploration in LLM Agents

    Feb 18, 2026Wenxuan Ding, Nicholas Tomlin, Greg DurrettLLM AgentsDecision-Making under Uncertainty

    New York University

  10. AI Arms and Influence: Frontier Models Exhibit Sophisticated Reasoning in Simulated Nuclear Crises

    Feb 16, 2026Kenneth PayneStrategic Reasoning Risks in Language ModelsLarge Language Model-Based Social Simulation

    King’s College London

  11. Multimodal Belief-Space Covariance Steering with Active Probing and Influence for Interactive Driving

    Feb 16, 2026Devodita Chakravarty, John Dolan, Yiwei LyuRisk-Sensitive PlanningAutonomous Driving Planning

    Department of Mechanical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, India · Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA · Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA

  12. Uncertainty-aware Causal Decision Making via Effect Bound Decomposition

    Jan 30, 2026Md Musfiqur Rahman, Ziwei Jiang, Hilaf Hasson +1Causal Effect EstimationParameter Identifiability

    Electrical and Computer Engineering, Purdue University · Computer Science, Johns Hopkins University · Cohesity

  13. Bayesian dynamic scheduling of multipurpose batch processes under incomplete look-ahead information

    Nov 30, 2025Taicheng Zheng, Dan Li, Jie LiDecision-Making under Uncertainty

    Centre for Process Integration, the Department of Chemical Engineering, The University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester, M13 9SS, United Kingdom

  14. People use fast and flat simulation to reason about new games

    Oct 13, 2025Katherine M. Collins, Cedegao E. Zhang, Lionel Wong +6Computational Cognitive ModelingHuman Behavior Simulation

    Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, United States · Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, United States · University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom +3

  15. Meta-learning ecological priors from large language models explains human learning and decision making

    Aug 28, 2025Akshay K. Jagadish, Mirko Thalmann, Julian Coda-Forno +2Computational Cognitive ModelingMeta-Learning

    Institute for Human-Centered AI, Helmholtz Computational Health Center, Munich, Germany · Computational Principles of Intelligence, Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tübingen, Germany · Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany +1

  16. The price of uncertainty for social consensus

    Aug 24, 2025Yunzhe Bai, Alec SunOpinion DynamicsMulti-Agent Consensus

  17. Sequential Cohort Selection under Uncertainty

    Aug 22, 2025Hortence Yiepnou, Christos DimitrakakisSequential Decision MakingPolicy Optimization

    University of Neuch atel

  18. Rethinking Prospect Theory for LLMs: Revealing the Instability of Decision-Making under Epistemic Uncertainty

    Aug 12, 2025Rui Wang, Qihan Lin, Jiayu Liu +7Prospect TheoryLLM Decision-Making

    Hong Kong University of Science and Technology · Huazhong University of Science and Technology · University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  19. Sufficient Decision Proxies for Decision-Focused Learning

    May 6, 2025Noah Schutte, Grigorii Veviurko, Krzysztof Postek +1Stochastic OptimizationLearning to Optimize

    Delft University of Technology · Independent Researcher

  20. Plan-Driven Adaptive Bidding for First-Price Auctions with Budget Constraints under Nonstationarity

    May 5, 2025Yige Wang, Jiashuo JiangPrimal-Dual OptimizationAutomated Bidding

    Department of Industrial Engineering & Decision Analytics, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

  21. Active Exploration via Autoregressive Generation of Missing Data

    May 29, 2024Tiffany Tianhui Cai, Hongseok Namkoong, Daniel Russo +1RL ExplorationAutoregressive Generation

    Department of Statistics Columbia University New York, NY 10025, USA · Decision, Risk, and Operations Division Columbia Business School New York, NY 10025, USA · Department of Mathematics Imperial College London London SW7 2AZ, United Kingdom

  22. 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

    Nov 30, 2021Zongmin LiuMulti-Criteria Decision AnalysisFuzzy Logic

    Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305 USA

  23. Learning in a Small/Big World

    Sep 24, 2020Benson Tsz Kin LeungDecision-Making under UncertaintyBounded Rationality

    Hong Kong Baptist University.