Related papers: Risk-Sensitive Reinforcement Learning: a Martingal…
We study the estimation of risk-sensitive policies in reinforcement learning problems defined by a Markov Decision Process (MDPs) whose state and action spaces are countably finite. Prior efforts are predominately afflicted by computational…
This paper studies continuous-time risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RL) under the entropy-regularized, exploratory diffusion process formulation with the exponential-form objective. The risk-sensitive objective arises either as the…
We derive a family of risk-sensitive reinforcement learning methods for agents, who face sequential decision-making tasks in uncertain environments. By applying a utility function to the temporal difference (TD) error, nonlinear…
We address the problem of inverse reinforcement learning in Markov decision processes where the agent is risk-sensitive. In particular, we model risk-sensitivity in a reinforcement learning framework by making use of models of human…
We present a scheme for sequential decision making with a risk-sensitive objective and constraints in a dynamic environment. A neural network is trained as an approximator of the mapping from parameter space to space of risk and policy with…
Stochastic optimal control of dynamical systems is a crucial challenge in sequential decision-making. Recently, control-as-inference approaches have had considerable success, providing a viable risk-sensitive framework to address the…
A Markov decision process can be parameterized by a transition kernel and a reward function. Both play essential roles in the study of reinforcement learning as evidenced by their presence in the Bellman equations. In our inquiry of various…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has gained substantial attention across diverse application domains and theoretical investigations. Existing literature on RL theory largely focuses on risk-neutral settings where the decision-maker learns to…
Many sequential decision-making problems that are currently automated, such as those in manufacturing or recommender systems, operate in an environment where there is either little uncertainty, or zero risk of catastrophe. As companies and…
In this paper, we consider risk-sensitive sequential decision-making in Reinforcement Learning (RL). Our contributions are two-fold. First, we introduce a novel and coherent quantification of risk, namely composite risk, which quantifies…
Classical reinforcement learning (RL) techniques are generally concerned with the design of decision-making policies driven by the maximisation of the expected outcome. Nevertheless, this approach does not take into consideration the…
The paper provides an overview of the theory and applications of risk-sensitive Markov decision processes. The term 'risk-sensitive' refers here to the use of the Optimized Certainty Equivalent as a means to measure expectation and risk.…
While reinforcement learning has shown experimental success in a number of applications, it is known to be sensitive to noise and perturbations in the parameters of the system, leading to high variance in the total reward amongst different…
Risk sensitivity has become a central theme in reinforcement learning (RL), where convex risk measures and robust formulations provide principled ways to model preferences beyond expected return. Recent extensions to multi-agent RL (MARL)…
We consider the challenge of finding a deterministic policy for a Markov decision process that uniformly (in all states) maximizes one reward subject to a probabilistic constraint over a different reward. Existing solutions do not fully…
This paper studies the problem of risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RSRL) in continuous time, where the environment is characterized by a controllable stochastic differential equation (SDE) and the objective is a potentially nonlinear…
Distributional reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful framework increasingly adopted in safety-critical domains for its ability to optimize risk-sensitive objectives. However, the role of the discount factor is often overlooked, as it is…
A key challenge in the field of reinforcement learning is to develop agents that behave cautiously in novel situations. It is generally impossible to anticipate all situations that an autonomous system may face or what behavior would best…
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…
Identifying uncertainty and taking mitigating actions is crucial for safe and trustworthy reinforcement learning agents, especially when deployed in high-risk environments. In this paper, risk sensitivity is promoted in a model-based…