English
Related papers

Related papers: Policy Gradients for CVaR-Constrained MDPs

200 papers

In many sequential decision-making problems we may want to manage risk by minimizing some measure of variability in rewards in addition to maximizing a standard criterion. Variance related risk measures are among the most common…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-03-19 Prashanth L. A. , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh

We study the problem of incorporating risk while making combinatorial decisions under uncertainty. We formulate a discrete submodular maximization problem for selecting a set using Conditional-Value-at-Risk (CVaR), a risk metric commonly…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-10-30 Lifeng Zhou , Pratap Tokekar

We consider optimal allocation problems with Conditional Value-At-Risk (CVaR) constraint. We prove, under very mild assumptions, the convergence of the Sample Average Approximation method (SAA) applied to this problem, and we also exhibit a…

Portfolio Management · Quantitative Finance 2025-05-19 Jérôme Lelong , Véronique Maume-Deschamps , William Thevenot

Risk-averse decision-making under uncertainty in partially observable domains is a central challenge in artificial intelligence and is essential for developing reliable autonomous agents. The formal framework for such problems is the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-02-27 Yaacov Pariente , Vadim Indelman

Reinforcement learning algorithms utilizing policy gradients (PG) to optimize Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR) face significant challenges with sample inefficiency, hindering their practical applications. This inefficiency stems from two…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-01 Yudong Luo , Yangchen Pan , Han Wang , Philip Torr , Pascal Poupart

Value-at-Risk (VaR) is one of the main regulatory tools used for risk management purposes. However, it is difficult to compute optimal VaR portfolios; that is, an optimal risk-reward portfolio allocation using VaR as the risk measure. This…

Portfolio Management · Quantitative Finance 2021-07-16 Onur Babat , Juan C. Vera , Luis F. Zuluaga

The problem of finding the optimal portfolio for investors is called the portfolio optimization problem. Such problem mainly concerns the expectation and variability of return (i.e., mean and variance). Although the variance would be the…

Portfolio Management · Quantitative Finance 2020-07-21 Kei Nakagawa , Shuhei Noma , Masaya Abe

This paper studies optimization of Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR) for Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with finite state and action sets. It introduces the Dynamically augmented CVaR (DCVaR) risk measure and provides an algorithm for its…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-12 Eugene A. Feinberg , Rui Ding

We propose a multilevel stochastic approximation (MLSA) scheme for the computation of the value-at-risk (VaR) and expected shortfall (ES) of a financial loss, which can only be computed via simulations conditionally on the realisation of…

Computational Finance · Quantitative Finance 2026-04-14 Stéphane Crépey , Noufel Frikha , Azar Louzi

Managing risk in dynamic decision problems is of cardinal importance in many fields such as finance and process control. The most common approach to defining risk is through various variance related criteria such as the Sharpe Ratio or the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-07-03 Dotan Di Castro , Aviv Tamar , Shie Mannor

Stochastic Dual Dynamic Programming (SDDP) is a widely used and fundamental algorithm for solving multistage stochastic optimization problems. Although SDDP has been frequently applied to solve risk-averse models with the Conditional…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-07-26 Joaquim Dias Garcia , Iago Leal , Raphael Chabar , Mario Veiga Pereira

Stochastic variance-reduced gradient (SVRG) is an optimization method originally designed for tackling machine learning problems with a finite sum structure. SVRG was later shown to work for policy evaluation, a problem in reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-22 Zilun Peng , Ahmed Touati , Pascal Vincent , Doina Precup

This paper addresses risk averse constrained optimization problems where the objective and constraint functions can only be computed by a blackbox subject to unknown uncertainties. To handle mixed aleatory/epistemic uncertainties, the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-10-18 Charles Audet , Jean Bigeon , Romain Couderc , Michael Kokkolaras

This article develops a new algorithm named TTRISK to solve high-dimensional risk-averse optimization problems governed by differential equations (ODEs and/or PDEs) under uncertainty. As an example, we focus on the so-called Conditional…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2022-12-02 Harbir Antil , Sergey Dolgov , Akwum Onwunta

We consider an online stochastic game with risk-averse agents whose goal is to learn optimal decisions that minimize the risk of incurring significantly high costs. Specifically, we use the Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR) as a risk measure…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-17 Zifan Wang , Yi Shen , Michael M. Zavlanos

We consider a class of risk-averse submodular maximization problems (RASM) where the objective is the conditional value-at-risk (CVaR) of a random nondecreasing submodular function at a given risk level. We propose valid inequalities and an…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-04-17 Hao-Hsiang Wu , Simge Kucukyavuz

This paper considers the problem of finding near-optimal Markovian randomized (MR) policies for finite-state-action, infinite-horizon, constrained risk-sensitive Markov decision processes (CRSMDPs). Constraints are in the form of standard…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-03-14 Uday Kumar M , Sanjay P Bhat , Veeraruna Kavitha , Nandyala Hemachandra

Several authors have recently developed risk-sensitive policy gradient methods that augment the standard expected cost minimization problem with a measure of variability in cost. These studies have focused on specific risk-measures, such as…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2015-06-09 Aviv Tamar , Yinlam Chow , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Shie Mannor

We propose and analyze algorithms for distributionally robust optimization of convex losses with conditional value at risk (CVaR) and $\chi^2$ divergence uncertainty sets. We prove that our algorithms require a number of gradient…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-12-14 Daniel Levy , Yair Carmon , John C. Duchi , Aaron Sidford

Financial portfolios are often optimized for maximum profit while subject to a constraint formulated in terms of the Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR). This amounts to solving a linear problem. However, in its original formulation this…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2014-08-13 Georg Hofmann