Related papers: Planning for Risk-Aversion and Expected Value in M…

In this paper we address the problem of decision making within a Markov decision process (MDP) framework where risk and modeling errors are taken into account. Our approach is to minimize a risk-sensitive conditional-value-at-risk (CVaR)…

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 present an algorithm to compute risk averse policies in Markov Decision Processes (MDP) when the total cost criterion is used together with the average value at risk (AVaR) metric. Risk averse policies are needed when large…

In many sequential decision-making problems we may want to manage risk by minimizing some measure of variability in costs in addition to minimizing a standard criterion. Conditional value-at-risk (CVaR) is a relatively new risk measure that…

Markov decision processes (MDPs) are the defacto frame-work for sequential decision making in the presence ofstochastic uncertainty. A classical optimization criterion forMDPs is to maximize the expected discounted-sum pay-off, which…

Conditional value-at-risk (CVaR) is a prominent risk measure in financial engineering, energy systems, and supply chain management. In these domains, Markov decision processes (MDPs) with a long-run CVaR criterion effectively mitigate cost…

In this work, we address risk-averse Bayes-adaptive reinforcement learning. We pose the problem of optimising the conditional value at risk (CVaR) of the total return in Bayes-adaptive Markov decision processes (MDPs). We show that a policy…

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…

We consider the problem of designing policies for Markov decision processes (MDPs) with dynamic coherent risk objectives and constraints. We begin by formulating the problem in a Lagrangian framework. Under the assumption that the risk…

We consider the stochastic shortest path planning problem in MDPs, i.e., the problem of designing policies that ensure reaching a goal state from a given initial state with minimum accrued cost. In order to account for rare but important…

CVaR (Conditional Value at Risk) is a risk metric widely used in finance. However, dynamically optimizing CVaR is difficult since it is not a standard Markov decision process (MDP) and the principle of dynamic programming fails. In this…

We consider finite-horizon Markov Decision Processes where parameters, such as transition probabilities, are unknown and estimated from data. The popular distributionally robust approach to addressing the parameter uncertainty can sometimes…

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…

We present the conditional value-at-risk (CVaR) in the context of Markov chains and Markov decision processes with reachability and mean-payoff objectives. CVaR quantifies risk by means of the expectation of the worst p-quantile. As such it…

We introduce and study constrained Markov Decision Processes (cMDPs) with anytime constraints. An anytime constraint requires the agent to never violate its budget at any point in time, almost surely. Although Markovian policies are no…

It was recently shown that dynamic programming (DP) methods for finding static CVaR-optimal policies in Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) can fail when based on the dual formulation, yet the root cause of this failure remains unclear. We…

We study a risk-constrained version of the stochastic shortest path (SSP) problem, where the risk measure considered is Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR). We propose two algorithms that obtain a locally risk-optimal policy by employing four…

Risk-averse decision-making under uncertainty in partially observable domains is a central challenge in artificial intelligence and is essential for developing reliable autonomous agents. The formal framework for such problems is the…

Value-at-risk (VaR), also known as quantile, is a crucial risk measure in finance and other fields. However, optimizing VaR metrics in Markov decision processes (MDPs) is challenging because VaR is non-additive and the traditional dynamic…

The popularity of Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR), a risk functional from finance, has been growing in the control systems community due to its intuitive interpretation and axiomatic foundation. We consider a nonstandard optimal control…