Related papers: Risk-Sensitive and Robust Decision-Making: a CVaR …

We consider large-scale Markov decision processes (MDPs) with a risk measure of variability in cost, under the risk-aware MDPs paradigm. Previous studies showed that risk-aware MDPs, based on a minimax approach to handling risk, can be…

In classical Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), action costs and transition probabilities are assumed to be known, although an accurate estimation of these parameters is often not possible in practice. This study addresses MDPs under cost…

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…

In this work, we tackle the problem of minimising the Conditional-Value-at-Risk (CVaR) of output quantities of complex differential models with random input data, using gradient-based approaches in combination with the Multi-Level Monte…

Constrained decision-making is essential for designing safe policies in real-world control systems, yet simulated environments often fail to capture real-world adversities. We consider the problem of learning a policy that will maximize the…

In many sequential decision-making problems one is interested in minimizing an expected cumulative cost while taking into account \emph{risk}, i.e., increased awareness of events of small probability and high consequences. Accordingly, the…

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…

We study a risk-constrained version of the stochastic shortest path (SSP) problem, where the risk measure considered is Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR). We propose two algorithms that obtain a locally risk-optimal policy by employing four…

The goal of a traditional Markov decision process (MDP) is to maximize expected cumulative reward over a defined horizon (possibly infinite). In many applications, however, a decision maker may be interested in optimizing a specific…

This paper investigates the optimization problem of an infinite stage discrete time Markov decision process (MDP) with a long-run average metric considering both mean and variance of rewards together. Such performance metric is important…

Risk sensitive decision making finds important applications in current day use cases. Existing risk measures consider a single or finite collection of random variables, which do not account for the asymptotic behaviour of underlying…

There are no computationally feasible algorithms that provide solutions to the finite horizon Risk-sensitive Constrained Markov Decision Process (Risk-CMDP) problem, even for problems with moderate horizon. With an aim to design the same,…

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…

We consider the sequential decision problem faced by the manager of an electric vehicle (EV) charging station, who aims to satisfy the charging demand of the customer while minimizing cost. Since the total time needed to charge the EV up to…

Options are generally learned by using an inaccurate environment model (or simulator), which contains uncertain model parameters. While there are several methods to learn options that are robust against the uncertainty of model parameters,…

In this paper, we consider a finite-horizon Markov decision process (MDP) for which the objective at each stage is to minimize a quantile-based risk measure (QBRM) of the sequence of future costs; we call the overall objective a dynamic…

Sequential decisions in volatile, high-stakes settings require more than maximizing expected return; they require principled uncertainty management. This paper presents the Uncertainty-Aware Markov Decision Process (UAMDP), a unified…

Prior work on safe Reinforcement Learning (RL) has studied risk-aversion to randomness in dynamics (aleatory) and to model uncertainty (epistemic) in isolation. We propose and analyze a new framework to jointly model the risk associated…

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…

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…