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Related papers: Risk-sensitive Reinforcement Learning

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Temporal difference (TD) learning is a cornerstone reinforcement learning (RL) method for policy evaluation, where the goal is to estimate the value function of a Markov decision process under a fixed policy. While a substantial body of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Donghwan Lee , Do Wan Kim

Temporal-difference and Q-learning play a key role in deep reinforcement learning, where they are empowered by expressive nonlinear function approximators such as neural networks. At the core of their empirical successes is the learned…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Yufeng Zhang , Qi Cai , Zhuoran Yang , Yongxin Chen , Zhaoran Wang

We study lifelong reinforcement learning (RL) in a regret minimization setting of linear contextual Markov decision process (MDP), where the agent needs to learn a multi-task policy while solving a streaming sequence of tasks. We propose an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-02 Sanae Amani , Lin F. Yang , Ching-An Cheng

While contemporary reinforcement learning research and applications have embraced policy gradient methods as the panacea of solving learning problems, value-based methods can still be useful in many domains as long as we can wrangle with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-16 Ashwin Ramaswamy , Ransalu Senanayake

In a wide variety of applications, humans interact with a complex environment by means of asynchronous stochastic discrete events in continuous time. Can we design online interventions that will help humans achieve certain goals in such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-07 Utkarsh Upadhyay , Abir De , Manuel Gomez-Rodriguez

Linear dynamical systems that obey stochastic differential equations are canonical models. While optimal control of known systems has a rich literature, the problem is technically hard under model uncertainty and there are hardly any…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-06-09 Mohamad Kazem Shirani Faradonbeh , Mohamad Sadegh Shirani Faradonbeh

We consider the problem of learning models for risk-sensitive reinforcement learning. We theoretically demonstrate that proper value equivalence, a method of learning models which can be used to plan optimally in the risk-neutral setting,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-05 Tyler Kastner , Murat A. Erdogdu , Amir-massoud Farahmand

This paper investigates how a Bayesian reinforcement learning method can be used to create a tactical decision-making agent for autonomous driving in an intersection scenario, where the agent can estimate the confidence of its recommended…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-11-04 Carl-Johan Hoel , Tommy Tram , Jonas Sjöberg

Temporal-Difference (TD) learning is a general and very useful tool for estimating the value function of a given policy, which in turn is required to find good policies. Generally speaking, TD learning updates states whenever they are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-24 Nishanth Anand , Doina Precup

We devise a distributional variant of gradient temporal-difference (TD) learning. Distributional reinforcement learning has been demonstrated to outperform the regular one in the recent study \citep{bellemare2017distributional}. In the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-04-04 Chao Qu , Shie Mannor , Huan Xu

Reinforcement learning has been applied to many interesting problems such as the famous TD-gammon and the inverted helicopter flight. However, little effort has been put into developing methods to learn policies for complex persistent tasks…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-06-22 Xiao Li , Calin Belta

Relative temporal-difference (TD) learning was introduced to mitigate the slow convergence of TD methods when the discount factor approaches one by subtracting a baseline from the temporal-difference update. While this idea has been studied…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-08 Masoud S. Sakha , Rushikesh Kamalapurkar , Sean Meyn

This paper addresses the problem of designing control policies for agents with unknown stochastic dynamics and control objectives specified using Linear Temporal Logic (LTL). Recent Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) algorithms have aimed to…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-04-23 Jun Wang , Hosein Hasanbeig , Kaiyuan Tan , Zihe Sun , Yiannis Kantaros

The literature on Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) typically assumes that humans take actions in order to minimize the expected value of a cost function, i.e., that humans are risk neutral. Yet, in practice, humans are often far from…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-03-23 Sumeet Singh , Jonathan Lacotte , Anirudha Majumdar , Marco Pavone

Sample efficiency and risk-awareness are central to the development of practical reinforcement learning (RL) for complex decision-making. The former can be addressed by transfer learning and the latter by optimizing some utility function of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-01 Michael Gimelfarb , André Barreto , Scott Sanner , Chi-Guhn Lee

We study whether a risk-sensitive objective from asset-pricing theory -- recursive utility -- improves reinforcement learning for portfolio allocation. The Bellman equation under recursive utility involves a certainty equivalent (CE) of…

General Finance · Quantitative Finance 2026-03-25 Minkey Chang

We study risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RL) based on an entropic risk measure in episodic non-stationary Markov decision processes (MDPs). Both the reward functions and the state transition kernels are unknown and allowed to vary…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-22 Yuhao Ding , Ming Jin , Javad Lavaei

Motivated by applications in risk-sensitive reinforcement learning, we study mean-variance optimization in a discounted reward Markov Decision Process (MDP). Specifically, we analyze a Temporal Difference (TD) learning algorithm with linear…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-13 Tejaram Sangadi , L. A. Prashanth , Krishna Jagannathan

The task of predicting long-term patient outcomes using supervised machine learning is a challenging one, in part because of the high variance of each patient's trajectory, which can result in the model over-fitting to the training data.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-09 Thomas Frost , Kezhi Li , Steve Harris

Model-Free Reinforcement Learning has achieved meaningful results in stable environments but, to this day, it remains problematic in regime changing environments like financial markets. In contrast, model-based RL is able to capture some…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-23 Eric Benhamou , David Saltiel , Serge Tabachnik , Sui Kai Wong , François Chareyron