Related papers: A Stochastic Primal-Dual Method for Optimization w…
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…
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…
Stochastic compositional optimization (SCO) has attracted considerable attention because of its broad applicability to important real-world problems. However, existing works on SCO assume that the projection within a solution update is…
We propose a new randomized algorithm for solving convex optimization problems that have a large number of constraints (with high probability). Existing methods like interior-point or Newton-type algorithms are hard to apply to such…
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…
We consider a composite convex minimization problem associated with regularized empirical risk minimization, which often arises in machine learning. We propose two new stochastic gradient methods that are based on stochastic dual averaging…
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…
While maximizing expected return is the goal in most reinforcement learning approaches, risk-sensitive objectives such as conditional value at risk (CVaR) are more suitable for many high-stakes applications. However, relatively little is…
Reinforcement learning is widely used in applications where one needs to perform sequential decisions while interacting with the environment. The problem becomes more challenging when the decision requirement includes satisfying some safety…
When optimising for conditional value at risk (CVaR) using policy gradients (PG), current methods rely on discarding a large proportion of trajectories, resulting in poor sample efficiency. We propose a reformulation of the CVaR…
This paper explores numerical methods for solving a convex differentiable semi-infinite program. We introduce a primal-dual gradient method which performs three updates iteratively: a momentum gradient ascend step to update the constraint…
This paper studies the optimization of Markov decision processes (MDPs) from a risk-seeking perspective, where the risk is measured by conditional value-at-risk (CVaR). The objective is to find a policy that maximizes the long-run CVaR of…
In this paper, we suggest a new framework for analyzing primal subgradient methods for nonsmooth convex optimization problems. We show that the classical step-size rules, based on normalization of subgradient, or on the knowledge of optimal…
Constrained combinatorial optimization problems are frequently reformulated as quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO) models in order to leverage emerging quantum optimization algorithms such as the Variational Quantum…
We study a continuous-time portfolio optimization problem under an explicit constraint on the Deviation Conditional Value-at-Risk (DCVaR), defined as the difference between the CVaR and the expected terminal wealth. While the mean-CVaR…
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…
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…
Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR) is a central tail-risk measure in stochastic structural mechanics, yet its accurate evaluation under high-dimensional, spatially correlated material uncertainty remains computationally prohibitive for…
Risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RL) aims to optimize policies that balance the expected reward and risk. In this paper, we present a novel risk-sensitive RL framework that employs an Iterated Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR)…
Value-at-Risk (VaR) and Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR) are popular risk measures from academic, industrial and regulatory perspectives. The problem of minimizing CVaR is theoretically known to be of Neyman-Pearson type binary solution. We…