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Fine-tuning pre-trained diffusion and flow models to optimize downstream utilities is central to real-world deployment. Existing entropy-regularized methods primarily maximize expected reward, providing no mechanism to shape tail behavior.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-20 Zifan Wang , Riccardo De Santi , Xiaoyu Mo , Michael M. Zavlanos , Andreas Krause , Karl H. Johansson

We study the best-arm identification problem in multi-armed bandits with stochastic, potentially private rewards, when the goal is to identify the arm with the highest quantile at a fixed, prescribed level. First, we propose a (non-private)…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-12-06 Kontantinos E. Nikolakakis , Dionysios S. Kalogerias , Or Sheffet , Anand D. Sarwate

In this paper, we consider the nonconvex minimization problem of the value-at-risk (VaR) that arises from financial risk analysis. By considering this problem as a special linear program with linear complementarity constraints (a bilevel…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-20 Jong-Shi Pang , Sven Leyffer

Making decisions with respect to just the expected returns in Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) cannot account for the potential range of high-risk, adverse outcomes associated with a decision. To this end, safety-aware MCTS often consider…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-08 Zuyuan Zhang , Arnob Ghosh , Tian Lan

Several well-established benchmark predictors exist for Value-at-Risk (VaR), a major instrument for financial risk management. Hybrid methods combining AR-GARCH filtering with skewed-$t$ residuals and the extreme value theory-based approach…

Risk Management · Quantitative Finance 2021-11-25 Shige Peng , Shuzhen Yang , Jianfeng Yao

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…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-07-28 Margaret P. Chapman , Jonathan P. Lacotte , Kevin M. Smith , Insoon Yang , Yuxi Han , Marco Pavone , Claire J. Tomlin

In bandit best-arm identification, an algorithm is tasked with finding the arm with highest mean reward with a specified accuracy as fast as possible. We study multi-fidelity best-arm identification, in which the algorithm can choose to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Riccardo Poiani , Rémy Degenne , Emilie Kaufmann , Alberto Maria Metelli , Marcello Restelli

Value-at-risk (VaR) is an established measure to assess risks in critical real-world applications with random environmental factors. This paper presents a novel VaR upper confidence bound (V-UCB) algorithm for maximizing the VaR of a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-14 Quoc Phong Nguyen , Zhongxiang Dai , Bryan Kian Hsiang Low , Patrick Jaillet

When AI systems make errors in high-stakes domains like medical diagnosis or autonomous vehicles, a single algorithmic flaw across varying operational contexts can generate highly heterogeneous losses that challenge traditional insurance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Dimitris Bertsimas , Agni Orfanoudaki

We propose a non-asymptotic convergence analysis of a two-step approach to learn a conditional value-at-risk (VaR) and a conditional expected shortfall (ES) using Rademacher bounds, in a non-parametric setup allowing for heavy-tails on the…

Computational Finance · Quantitative Finance 2024-09-20 D Barrera , S Crépey , E Gobet , Hoang-Dung Nguyen , B Saadeddine

Best arm identification (BAI) aims to identify the highest-performance arm among a set of $K$ arms by collecting stochastic samples from each arm. In real-world problems, the best arm needs to satisfy additional feasibility constraints.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-26 Ting Cai , Kirthevasan Kandasamy

We study risk-sensitive Reinforcement Learning (RL), where we aim to maximize the Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR) with a fixed risk tolerance $\tau$. Prior theoretical work studying risk-sensitive RL focuses on the tabular Markov Decision…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-21 Yulai Zhao , Wenhao Zhan , Xiaoyan Hu , Ho-fung Leung , Farzan Farnia , Wen Sun , Jason D. Lee

In high-stakes machine learning applications, it is crucial to not only perform well on average, but also when restricted to difficult examples. To address this, we consider the problem of training models in a risk-averse manner. We propose…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-09 Sebastian Curi , Kfir. Y. Levy , Stefanie Jegelka , Andreas Krause

In this paper, we study a novel episodic risk-sensitive Reinforcement Learning (RL) problem, named Iterated CVaR RL, which aims to maximize the tail of the reward-to-go at each step, and focuses on tightly controlling the risk of getting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-12 Yihan Du , Siwei Wang , Longbo Huang

In this paper, we study risk-sensitive Reinforcement Learning (RL), focusing on the objective of Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR) with risk tolerance $\tau$. Starting with multi-arm bandits (MABs), we show the minimax CVaR regret rate is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-26 Kaiwen Wang , Nathan Kallus , Wen Sun

We focus on the problem of best-arm identification in a stochastic multi-arm bandit with temporally decreasing variances for the arms' rewards. We model arm rewards as Gaussian random variables with fixed means and variances that decrease…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-12 Tamojeet Roychowdhury , Kota Srinivas Reddy , Krishna P Jagannathan , Sharayu Moharir

In this paper we discuss a general methodology to compute the market risk measure over long time horizons and at extreme percentiles, which are the typical conditions needed for estimating Economic Capital. The proposed approach extends the…

Risk Management · Quantitative Finance 2014-08-12 Luca Spadafora , Marco Dubrovich , Marcello Terraneo

Value at risk (VaR) and expected shortfall (ES) are common high quantile-based risk measures adopted in financial regulations and risk management. In this paper, we propose a tail risk measure based on the most probable maximum size of risk…

Risk Management · Quantitative Finance 2025-06-17 Kan Chen , Tuoyuan Cheng

This paper introduces a novel approach to financial risk assessment by incorporating topological data analysis (TDA), specifically cohomology groups, into the evaluation of equities portfolios. The study aims to go beyond traditional risk…

Risk Management · Quantitative Finance 2023-10-30 Amit Kumar Jha

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-11-22 Facundo N. Airaudo , Harbir Antil , Rainald Löhner , Umarkhon Rakhimov