English

Breaking the Dimensional Barrier: Dynamic Portfolio Choice with Parameter Uncertainty via Pontryagin Projection

Computational Finance 2026-02-27 v3

Abstract

We study continuous-time CRRA portfolio choice in diffusion markets with estimated and hence uncertain coefficients. Nature draws a latent parameter θq\theta \sim q at time 00 and keeps it fixed; the investor never observes θ\theta and must commit to a single θ\theta-blind policy maximizing an ex-ante objective, treating qq as a decision-time input. We propose a simulation-only two-stage solver.Stage 1 (DPO) performs BPTT-based stochastic gradient ascent through an Euler simulator while sampling θ\theta only inside the simulator. Stage 2 (Pontryagin projection) aggregates costate blocks across θq\theta \sim q and enforces the qq-aggregated stationarity condition within the deployable class; the resulting correction can be amortized via interactive distillation. We refer to the full Stage 1 + Stage 2 pipeline as PG-DPO.We prove a uniform conditional BPTT-PMP correspondence and a residual-based policy-gap bound with explicit discretization and Monte Carlo error terms. Experiments on high-dimensional Gaussian drift-uncertainty and factor-driven benchmarks show that projection stabilizes learning and accurately recovers analytic decision-time references, while a model-free PPO baseline remains far from the targets.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2601.03175,
  title  = {Breaking the Dimensional Barrier: Dynamic Portfolio Choice with Parameter Uncertainty via Pontryagin Projection},
  author = {Jeonggyu Huh and Hyeng Keun Koo},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.03175},
  year   = {2026}
}