Related papers: Optimizing the CVaR via Sampling

For many real-world decision-making problems subject to uncertainty, it may be essential to deal with multiple and often conflicting objectives while taking the decision-makers' risk preferences into account. Conditional value-at-risk…

Accurate computation of robust estimates for extremal quantiles of empirical distributions is an essential task for a wide range of applicative fields, including economic policymaking and the financial industry. Such estimates are…

Mainstream approximate action-value iteration reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms suffer from overestimation bias, leading to suboptimal policies in high-variance stochastic environments. Quantile-based action-value iteration methods…

In financial risk management, Value at Risk (VaR) is widely used to estimate potential portfolio losses. VaR's limitation is its inability to account for the magnitude of losses beyond a certain threshold. Expected Shortfall (ES) addresses…

In order to model risk aversion in reinforcement learning, an emerging line of research adapts familiar algorithms to optimize coherent risk functionals, a class that includes conditional value-at-risk (CVaR). Because optimizing the…

The development of Distributional Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has introduced a natural way to incorporate risk sensitivity into value-based and actor-critic methods by employing risk measures other than expectation in the value function.…

We develop a risk-averse safety analysis method for stochastic systems on discrete infinite time horizons. Our method quantifies the notion of risk for a control system in terms of the severity of a harmful random outcome in a fraction of…

In this paper we study a multi-arm bandit problem in which the quality of each arm is measured by the Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR) at some level alpha of the reward distribution. While existing works in this setting mainly focus on…

Safety in reinforcement learning (RL) is a key property in both training and execution in many domains such as autonomous driving or finance. In this paper, we formalize it with a constrained RL formulation in the distributional RL setting.…

We study risk-sensitive planning under partial observability using the dynamic risk measure Iterated Conditional Value-at-Risk (ICVaR). A policy evaluation algorithm for ICVaR is developed with finite-time performance guarantees that do not…

We consider a class of chance-constrained programs in which profit needs to be maximized while enforcing that a given adverse event remains rare. Using techniques from large deviations and extreme value theory, we show how the optimal value…

We show how to reduce the problem of computing VaR and CVaR with Student T return distributions to evaluation of analytical functions of the moments. This allows an analysis of the risk properties of systems to be carefully attributed…

We study Bayesian persuasion when the receiver evaluates actions by reward-side Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR) rather than expected utility. CVaR preferences break the standard action-based direct-recommendation reduction: merging signals…

The global financial crisis of 2007-2009 highlighted the crucial role systemic risk plays in ensuring stability of financial markets. Accurate assessment of systemic risk would enable regulators to introduce suitable policies to mitigate…

We propose a sigmoidal approximation for the value-at-risk (that we call SigVaR) and we use this approximation to tackle nonlinear programs (NLPs) with chance constraints. We prove that the approximation is conservative and that the level…

Value-at-risk (VaR) is an established measure to assess risks in critical real-world applications with random environmental factors. This paper presents a novel VaR upper confidence bound (V-UCB) algorithm for maximizing the VaR of a…

Machine learning (ML) models used in prediction and classification tasks may display performance disparities across population groups determined by sensitive attributes (e.g., race, sex, age). We consider the problem of evaluating the…

The Stochastic Shortest Path (SSP) problem models probabilistic sequential-decision problems where an agent must pursue a goal while minimizing a cost function. Because of the probabilistic dynamics, it is desired to have a cost function…

Portfolio selection in the periodic investment of securities modeled by a multivariate Merton model with dependent jumps is considered. The optimization framework is designed to maximize expected terminal wealth when portfolio risk is…

Online portfolio selection research has so far focused mainly on minimizing regret defined in terms of wealth growth. Practical financial decision making, however, is deeply concerned with both wealth and risk. We consider online learning…