Related papers: Algorithms for CVaR Optimization in MDPs

We develop a variant of the stochastic prox-linear method for minimizing the Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR) objective. CVaR is a risk measure focused on minimizing worst-case performance, defined as the average of the top quantile of the…

Given measurements from sensors and a set of standard forces, an optimization based approach to identify weakness in structures is introduced. The key novelty lies in letting the load and measurements to be random variables. Subsequently…

The popular systemic risk measure CoVaR (conditional Value-at-Risk) and its variants are widely used in economics and finance. In this article, we propose joint dynamic forecasting models for the Value-at-Risk (VaR) and CoVaR. The CoVaR…

Conditional value-at-risk (CVaR) precisely characterizes the influence that rare, catastrophic events can exert over decisions. Such characterizations are important for both normal decision-making and for psychiatric conditions such as…

Conditional value-at-risk (CVaR) and value-at-risk (VaR) are popular tail-risk measures in finance and insurance industries as well as in highly reliable, safety-critical uncertain environments where often the underlying probability…

We consider the problem of risk-sensitive motion planning in the presence of randomly moving obstacles. To this end, we adopt a model predictive control (MPC) scheme and pose the obstacle avoidance constraint in the MPC problem as a…

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…

Robust Markov Decision Processes (RMDPs) have received significant research interest, offering an alternative to standard Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) that often assume fixed transition probabilities. RMDPs address this by optimizing…

This article considers the problem of risk-optimal allocation of security measures when the actuators of an uncertain control system are under attack. We consider an adversary injecting false data into the actuator channels. The attack…

In a wide variety of sequential decision making problems, it can be important to estimate the impact of rare events in order to minimize risk exposure. A popular risk measure is the conditional value-at-risk (CVaR), which is commonly…

We incorporate the conditional value-at-risk (CVaR) quantity into a generalized class of Pickands estimators. By introducing CVaR, the newly developed estimators not only retain the desirable properties of consistency, location, and scale…

Distributional reinforcement learning (RL) -- in which agents learn about all the possible long-term consequences of their actions, and not just the expected value -- is of great recent interest. One of the most important affordances of a…

Instead of controlling "symmetric" risks measured by central moments of investment return or terminal wealth, more and more portfolio models have shifted their focus to manage "asymmetric" downside risks that the investment return is below…

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…

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…

In this paper, we present a novel Model Predictive Control method for autonomous robots subject to arbitrary forms of uncertainty. The proposed Risk-Aware Model Predictive Path Integral (RA-MPPI) control utilizes the Conditional…

The problem of data uncertainty has motivated the incorporation of robust optimization in various arenas, beyond the Markowitz portfolio optimization. This work presents the extension of the robust optimization framework for the…

In this paper we present an algorithm to compute risk averse policies in Markov Decision Processes (MDP) when the total cost criterion is used together with the average value at risk (AVaR) metric. Risk averse policies are needed when large…

The multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem is a ubiquitous decision-making problem that exemplifies the exploration-exploitation tradeoff. Standard formulations exclude risk in decision making. Risk notably complicates the basic reward-maximising…

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…