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Related papers: Policy Gradients for CVaR-Constrained MDPs

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Value-at-risk (VaR), also known as quantile, is a crucial risk measure in finance and other fields. However, optimizing VaR metrics in Markov decision processes (MDPs) is challenging because VaR is non-additive and the traditional dynamic…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-07-31 Li Xia , Jinyan Pan

Chance-constrained programs (CCPs) provide a powerful modeling framework for decision-making under uncertainty, but their nonconvex feasible regions make them computationally challenging. A widely used convex inner approximation replaces…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-31 Rui Chen , Nan Jiang

Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR) is a leading tail-risk measure in finance, central to both regulatory and portfolio optimization frameworks. Classical estimation of CVaR and its gradients relies on Monte Carlo simulation, incurring…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2026-05-19 Vasilis Skarlatos , Nikos Konofaos

In this paper, we propose a novel reinforcement- learning algorithm consisting in a stochastic variance-reduced version of policy gradient for solving Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). Stochastic variance-reduced gradient (SVRG) methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-06-15 Matteo Papini , Damiano Binaghi , Giuseppe Canonaco , Matteo Pirotta , Marcello Restelli

This paper develops a safety analysis method for stochastic systems that is sensitive to the possibility and severity of rare harmful outcomes. We define risk-sensitive safe sets as sub-level sets of the solution to a non-standard optimal…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-06-28 Margaret P. Chapman , Riccardo Bonalli , Kevin M. Smith , Insoon Yang , Marco Pavone , Claire J. Tomlin

Optimizing risk measures such as Value-at-Risk (VaR) and Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR) of a general loss distribution is usually difficult, because 1) the loss function might lack structural properties such as convexity or…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2016-08-03 Helin Zhu , Joshua Hale , Enlu Zhou

We propose an iterative gradient-based algorithm to efficiently solve the portfolio selection problem with multiple spectral risk constraints. Since the conditional value at risk (CVaR) is a special case of the spectral risk measure, our…

Portfolio Management · Quantitative Finance 2015-03-26 Carlos Abad , Garud Iyengar

The popularity of Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR), a risk functional from finance, has been growing in the control systems community due to its intuitive interpretation and axiomatic foundation. We consider a nonstandard optimal control…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-06-22 Margaret P. Chapman , Michael Fauss , Kevin M. Smith

This paper proposes a safety analysis method that facilitates a tunable balance between the worst-case and risk-neutral perspectives. First, we define a risk-sensitive safe set to specify the degree of safety attained by a stochastic…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-07-28 Margaret P. Chapman , Jonathan P. Lacotte , Kevin M. Smith , Insoon Yang , Yuxi Han , Marco Pavone , Claire J. Tomlin

Optimal portfolio allocation is often formulated as a constrained risk problem, where one aims to minimize a risk measure subject to some performance constraints. This paper presents new Bayesian Optimization algorithms for such constrained…

Portfolio Management · Quantitative Finance 2025-03-25 Robert Millar , Jinglai Li

Motivated by the prominence of Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR) as a measure for tail risk in settings affected by uncertainty, we develop a new formula for approximating CVaR based optimization objectives and their gradients from limited…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-08-25 Anand Deo , Karthyek Murthy

Optimizing Conditional Value-at-risk (CVaR) using policy gradient (a.k.a CVaR-PG) faces significant challenges of sample inefficiency. This inefficiency stems from the fact that it focuses on tail-end performance and overlooks many sampled…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Yudong Luo , Erick Delage

We present on-line policy gradient algorithms for computing the locally optimal policy of a constrained, average cost, finite state Markov Decision Process. The stochastic approximation algorithms require estimation of the gradient of the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-12-18 Vikram Krishnamurthy , Felisa Vazquez Abad

We consider the stochastic shortest path planning problem in MDPs, i.e., the problem of designing policies that ensure reaching a goal state from a given initial state with minimum accrued cost. In order to account for rare but important…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-03-30 Mohamadreza Ahmadi , Anushri Dixit , Joel W. Burdick , Aaron D. Ames

We consider continuous-time stochastic optimal control problems featuring Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR) in the objective. The major difficulty in these problems arises from time-inconsistency, which prevents us from directly using…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-05-27 Christopher W. Miller , Insoon Yang

Risk measures are important key figures to measure the adequacy of the reserves of a company. The most common risk measures in practice are Value-at-Risk (VaR) and Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR). Recently, quantum-based algorithms are…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-01-29 Christian Laudagé , Ivica Turkalj

In this paper we study variational inequalities (VI) defined by the conditional value-at-risk (CVaR) of uncertain functions. We introduce stochastic approximation schemes that employ an empirical estimate of the CVaR at each iteration to…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-08-28 Jasper Verbree , Ashish Cherukuri

Autonomous vehicles face the problem of optimizing the expected performance of subsequent maneuvers while bounding the risk of collision with surrounding dynamic obstacles. These obstacles, such as agent vehicles, often exhibit stochastic…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-02-28 Rashid Alyassi , Majid Khonji

We introduce two quantum algorithms to compute the Value at Risk (VaR) and Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR) of financial derivatives using quantum computers: the first by applying existing ideas from quantum risk analysis to derivative…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2024-04-17 Nikitas Stamatopoulos , B. David Clader , Stefan Woerner , William J. Zeng

We present the conditional value-at-risk (CVaR) in the context of Markov chains and Markov decision processes with reachability and mean-payoff objectives. CVaR quantifies risk by means of the expectation of the worst p-quantile. As such it…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2018-05-09 Jan Křetínský , Tobias Meggendorfer