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Related papers: Practical Risk Measures in Reinforcement Learning

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Meta reinforcement learning (RL) allows agents to leverage experience across a distribution of tasks on which the agent can train at will, enabling faster learning of optimal policies on new test tasks. Despite its success in improving…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Tingting Ni , Maryam Kamgarpour

Asset allocation using reinforcement learning has advantages such as flexibility in goal setting and utilization of various information. However, existing asset allocation methods do not consider the following viewpoints in solving the…

Computational Finance · Quantitative Finance 2022-07-07 Jungyu Ahn , Sungwoo Park , Jiwoon Kim , Ju-hong Lee

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is essentially a trial-and-error learning procedure which may cause unsafe behavior during the exploration-and-exploitation process. This hinders the application of RL to real-world control problems, especially…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-03 Yutong Li , Nan Li , H. Eric Tseng , Anouck Girard , Dimitar Filev , Ilya Kolmanovsky

We introduce a simple but effective method for managing risk in model-based reinforcement learning with trajectory sampling that involves probabilistic safety constraints and balancing of optimism in the face of epistemic uncertainty and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-12 Marin Vlastelica , Sebastian Blaes , Cristina Pineri , Georg Martius

Continual reinforcement learning (continual RL) seeks to formalize the notions of lifelong learning and endless adaptation in RL. In particular, the aim of continual RL is to develop RL agents that can maintain a careful balance between…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Juan Sebastian Rojas , Chi-Guhn Lee

Using Reinforcement Learning (RL) in simulation to construct policies useful in real life is challenging. This is often attributed to the sequential decision making aspect: inaccuracies in simulation accumulate over multiple steps, hence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-06-09 Rika Antonova , Silvia Cruciani

This article is a gentle discussion about the field of reinforcement learning in practice, about opportunities and challenges, touching a broad range of topics, with perspectives and without technical details. The article is based on both…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-25 Yuxi Li

Traditional portfolio management methods can incorporate specific investor preferences but rely on accurate forecasts of asset returns and covariances. Reinforcement learning (RL) methods do not rely on these explicit forecasts and are…

Portfolio Management · Quantitative Finance 2022-03-23 Ruan Pretorius , Terence van Zyl

Learning near-optimal behaviour from an expert's demonstrations typically relies on the assumption that the learner knows the features that the true reward function depends on. In this paper, we study the problem of learning from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-28 Luis Haug , Sebastian Tschiatschek , Adish Singla

Reinforcement learning (RL) experiments have notoriously high variance, and minor details can have disproportionately large effects on measured outcomes. This is problematic for creating reproducible research and also serves as an obstacle…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-08 Johan Bjorck , Carla P. Gomes , Kilian Q. Weinberger

Safe exploration is critical for using reinforcement learning (RL) in risk-sensitive environments. Recent work learns risk measures which measure the probability of violating constraints, which can then be used to enable safety. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-08 Michael Luo , Ashwin Balakrishna , Brijen Thananjeyan , Suraj Nair , Julian Ibarz , Jie Tan , Chelsea Finn , Ion Stoica , Ken Goldberg

This paper addresses the problem of maintaining safety during training in Reinforcement Learning (RL), such that the safety constraint violations are bounded at any point during learning. In a variety of RL applications the safety of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-19 Rohan Mitta , Hosein Hasanbeig , Jun Wang , Daniel Kroening , Yiannis Kantaros , Alessandro Abate

Despite the numerous advances, reinforcement learning remains away from widespread acceptance for autonomous controller design as compared to classical methods due to lack of ability to effectively tackle the reality gap. The reliance on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-23 Narendra Patwardhan , Zequn Wang

In a reinforcement learning (RL) setting, the agent's optimal strategy heavily depends on her risk preferences and the underlying model dynamics of the training environment. These two aspects influence the agent's ability to make…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Anthony Coache , Sebastian Jaimungal

A reinforcement learning (RL) policy trained in a nominal environment could fail in a new/perturbed environment due to the existence of dynamic variations. Existing robust methods try to obtain a fixed policy for all envisioned dynamic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-10 Yikun Cheng , Pan Zhao , Manan Gandhi , Bo Li , Evangelos Theodorou , Naira Hovakimyan

The Robbins-Monro stochastic approximation algorithm is a foundation of many algorithmic frameworks for reinforcement learning (RL), and often an efficient approach to solving (or approximating the solution to) complex optimal control…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-03-19 Andrey Bernstein , Yue Chen , Marcello Colombino , Emiliano Dall'Anese , Prashant Mehta , Sean Meyn

We consider reinforcement learning with performance evaluated by a dynamic risk measure. We construct a projected risk-averse dynamic programming equation and study its properties. Then we propose risk-averse counterparts of the methods of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-03-03 Umit Kose , Andrzej Ruszczynski

Real-world reinforcement learning (RL) problems often demand that agents behave safely by obeying a set of designed constraints. We address the challenge of safe RL by coupling a safety guide based on model predictive control (MPC) with a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-30 Samuel Pfrommer , Tanmay Gautam , Alec Zhou , Somayeh Sojoudi

Many applied settings in empirical economics involve simultaneous estimation of a large number of parameters. In particular, applied economists are often interested in estimating the effects of many-valued treatments (like teacher effects…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-04-03 Alberto Abadie , Maximilian Kasy

In safe Reinforcement Learning (RL), safety cost is typically defined as a function dependent on the immediate state and actions. In practice, safety constraints can often be non-Markovian due to the insufficient fidelity of state…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-07 Siow Meng Low , Akshat Kumar