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In this paper, we study a few challenging theoretical and numerical issues on the well known trust region policy optimization for deep reinforcement learning. The goal is to find a policy that maximizes the total expected reward when the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-11-27 Mingming Zhao , Yongfeng Li , Zaiwen Wen

Robust Reinforcement Learning aims to derive optimal behavior that accounts for model uncertainty in dynamical systems. However, previous studies have shown that by considering the worst case scenario, robust policies can be overly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-25 Esther Derman , Daniel J. Mankowitz , Timothy A. Mann , Shie Mannor

Reinforcement learning, mathematically described by Markov Decision Problems, may be approached either through dynamic programming or policy search. Actor-critic algorithms combine the merits of both approaches by alternating between steps…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-31 Harshat Kumar , Alec Koppel , Alejandro Ribeiro

Recent advances in deep reinforcement learning have demonstrated the capability of learning complex control policies from many types of environments. When learning policies for safety-critical applications, it is essential to be sensitive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-12 Yichuan Charlie Tang , Jian Zhang , Ruslan Salakhutdinov

In recent years, reinforcement learning (RL) systems with general goals beyond a cumulative sum of rewards have gained traction, such as in constrained problems, exploration, and acting upon prior experiences. In this paper, we consider…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-07 Junyu Zhang , Alec Koppel , Amrit Singh Bedi , Csaba Szepesvari , Mengdi Wang

Reinforcement learning (RL) and Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL), in particular, have the potential to disrupt and are already changing the way we interact with the world. One of the key indicators of their applicability is their ability…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-20 Nikolai Rozanov

This study develops and evaluates a deep reinforcement learning framework for dynamic portfolio allocation across global equity markets. The Soft Actor-Critic algorithm is used to learn continuous portfolio weights within a Markov Decision…

Portfolio Management · Quantitative Finance 2026-05-19 Kamil Kashif , Robert Ślepaczuk

Policy gradient methods in actor-critic reinforcement learning (RL) have become perhaps the most promising approaches to solving continuous optimal control problems. However, the trial-and-error nature of RL and the inherent randomness…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-19 Ruofan Wu , Junmin Zhong , Jennie Si

Real-world applications require RL algorithms to act safely. During learning process, it is likely that the agent executes sub-optimal actions that may lead to unsafe/poor states of the system. Exploration is particularly brittle in…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-06-17 Elena Smirnova , Elvis Dohmatob , Jérémie Mary

Applying probabilistic models to reinforcement learning (RL) enables the application of powerful optimisation tools such as variational inference to RL. However, existing inference frameworks and their algorithms pose significant challenges…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-17 Matthew Fellows , Anuj Mahajan , Tim G. J. Rudner , Shimon Whiteson

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved remarkable success, yet its deployment in real-world scenarios is often limited by vulnerability to environmental uncertainties. Distributionally robust RL (DR-RL) algorithms have been proposed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Mingxuan Cui , Duo Zhou , Yuxuan Han , Grani A. Hanasusanto , Qiong Wang , Huan Zhang , Zhengyuan Zhou

We present a reinforcement learning (RL) approach for robust optimisation of risk-aware performance criteria. To allow agents to express a wide variety of risk-reward profiles, we assess the value of a policy using rank dependent expected…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-16 Sebastian Jaimungal , Silvana Pesenti , Ye Sheng Wang , Hariom Tatsat

Policy gradient methods have become popular in multi-agent reinforcement learning, but they suffer from high variance due to the presence of environmental stochasticity and exploring agents (i.e., non-stationarity), which is potentially…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-21 Yuchen Xiao , Xueguang Lyu , Christopher Amato

Existing work on risk-sensitive reinforcement learning - both for symmetric and downside risk measures - has typically used direct Monte-Carlo estimation of policy gradients. While this approach yields unbiased gradient estimates, it also…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-09 Thomas Spooner , Rahul Savani

This paper presents a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) framework for dynamic portfolio optimization under market uncertainty and risk. The proposed model integrates a Sharpe ratio-based reward function with direct risk control mechanisms,…

Portfolio Management · Quantitative Finance 2025-11-17 Emmanuel Lwele , Sabuni Emmanuel , Sitali Gabriel Sitali

We propose a reinforcement learning (RL) framework under a broad class of risk objectives, characterized by convex scoring functions. This class covers many common risk measures, such as variance, Expected Shortfall, entropic Value-at-Risk,…

Mathematical Finance · Quantitative Finance 2025-05-16 Shanyu Han , Yang Liu , Xiang Yu

Safety is essential for reinforcement learning (RL) applied in real-world situations. Chance constraints are suitable to represent the safety requirements in stochastic systems. Previous chance-constrained RL methods usually have a low…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-17 Baiyu Peng , Yao Mu , Yang Guan , Shengbo Eben Li , Yuming Yin , Jianyu Chen

Recently, safe reinforcement learning (RL) with the actor-critic structure for continuous control tasks has received increasing attention. It is still challenging to learn a near-optimal control policy with safety and convergence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-06 Xinglong Zhang , Yaoqian Peng , Biao Luo , Wei Pan , Xin Xu , Haibin Xie

Actor-critic (AC) methods are widely used in reinforcement learning (RL) and benefit from the flexibility of using any policy gradient method as the actor and value-based method as the critic. The critic is usually trained by minimizing the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-01 Sharan Vaswani , Amirreza Kazemi , Reza Babanezhad , Nicolas Le Roux

The volatility fitting is one of the core problems in the equity derivatives business. Through a set of deterministic rules, the degrees of freedom in the implied volatility surface encoding (parametrization, density, diffusion) are…

Computational Finance · Quantitative Finance 2024-10-16 Emmanuel Gnabeyeu , Omar Karkar , Imad Idboufous