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Regret Bounds for Risk-Sensitive Reinforcement Learning

Machine Learning 2022-10-12 v1

Abstract

In safety-critical applications of reinforcement learning such as healthcare and robotics, it is often desirable to optimize risk-sensitive objectives that account for tail outcomes rather than expected reward. We prove the first regret bounds for reinforcement learning under a general class of risk-sensitive objectives including the popular CVaR objective. Our theory is based on a novel characterization of the CVaR objective as well as a novel optimistic MDP construction.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2210.05650,
  title  = {Regret Bounds for Risk-Sensitive Reinforcement Learning},
  author = {O. Bastani and Y. J. Ma and E. Shen and W. Xu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2210.05650},
  year   = {2022}
}