Related papers: Two steps to risk sensitivity
For many real-world decision-making problems subject to uncertainty, it may be essential to deal with multiple and often conflicting objectives while taking the decision-makers' risk preferences into account. Conditional value-at-risk…
In this work, we study risk-aware reinforcement learning for quadrupedal locomotion. Our approach trains a family of risk-conditioned policies using a Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR) constrained policy optimization technique that provides…
The reward signal plays a central role in defining the desired behaviors of agents in reinforcement learning (RL). Rewards collected from realistic environments could be perturbed, corrupted, or noisy due to an adversary, sensor error, or…
Autonomous navigation of Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USV) in marine environments with current flows is challenging, and few prior works have addressed the sensorbased navigation problem in such environments under no prior knowledge of the…
Active reinforcement learning (ARL) is a variant on reinforcement learning where the agent does not observe the reward unless it chooses to pay a query cost c > 0. The central question of ARL is how to quantify the long-term value of reward…
This paper focuses on reinforcement learning (RL) with limited prior knowledge. In the domain of swarm robotics for instance, the expert can hardly design a reward function or demonstrate the target behavior, forbidding the use of both…
Despite achieving excellent performance on benchmarks, deep neural networks often underperform in real-world deployment due to sensitivity to minor, often imperceptible shifts in input data, known as distributional shifts. These shifts are…
We consider continuous-time stochastic optimal control problems featuring Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR) in the objective. The major difficulty in these problems arises from time-inconsistency, which prevents us from directly using…
This paper addresses allocation methodologies for a risk measure inherited from ruin theory. Specifically, we consider a dynamic value-at-risk (VaR) measure defined as the smallest initial capital needed to ensure that the ultimate ruin…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is a technique to learn the control policy for an agent that interacts with a stochastic environment. In any given state, the agent takes some action, and the environment determines the probability distribution…
Motivated by the prominence of Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR) as a measure for tail risk in settings affected by uncertainty, we develop a new formula for approximating CVaR based optimization objectives and their gradients from limited…
Ensuring the safety of neural networks under input uncertainty is a fundamental challenge in safety-critical applications. This paper builds on and expands Fazlyab's quadratic-constraint (QC) and semidefinite-programming (SDP) framework for…
We develop a framework for interacting with uncertain environments in reinforcement learning (RL) by leveraging preferences in the form of utility functions. We claim that there is value in considering different risk measures during…
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…
The Value-at-Risk (VaR) and the Expected Shortfall (ES) are the two most popular risk measures in banking and insurance regulation. To bridge between the two regulatory risk measures, the Probability Equivalent Level of VaR-ES (PELVE) was…
Quantifying uncertainty about a policy's long-term performance is important to solve sequential decision-making tasks. We study the problem from a model-based Bayesian reinforcement learning perspective, where the goal is to learn the…
Autonomous vehicles inevitably encounter a vast array of scenarios in real-world environments. Addressing long-tail scenarios, particularly those involving intensive interactions with numerous traffic participants, remains one of the most…
When learning to behave in a stochastic environment where safety is critical, such as driving a vehicle in traffic, it is natural for human drivers to plan fallback strategies as a backup to use if ever there is an unexpected change in the…
This paper develops a reinforcement learning (RL)approach to solve a cooperative, multi-agent Volt-Var Control (VVC) problem for high solar penetration distribution systems. The ingenuity of our RL method lies in a novel two-stage…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is a machine learning approach that trains agents to maximize cumulative rewards through interactions with environments. The integration of RL with deep learning has recently resulted in impressive achievements…