English
Related papers

Related papers: Two steps to risk sensitivity

200 papers

We consider an online stochastic game with risk-averse agents whose goal is to learn optimal decisions that minimize the risk of incurring significantly high costs. Specifically, we use the Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR) as a risk measure…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-17 Zifan Wang , Yi Shen , Michael M. Zavlanos

One major obstacle that precludes the success of reinforcement learning in real-world applications is the lack of robustness, either to model uncertainties or external disturbances, of the trained policies. Robustness is critical when the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-05 Rahul Singh , Qinsheng Zhang , Yongxin Chen

Standard deep reinforcement learning (DRL) aims to maximize expected reward, considering collected experiences equally in formulating a policy. This differs from human decision-making, where gains and losses are valued differently and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-17 Jared Markowitz , Ryan W. Gardner , Ashley Llorens , Raman Arora , I-Jeng Wang

In a wide variety of sequential decision making problems, it can be important to estimate the impact of rare events in order to minimize risk exposure. A popular risk measure is the conditional value-at-risk (CVaR), which is commonly…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-12-11 Dylan Troop , Frédéric Godin , Jia Yuan Yu

Risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RL) is crucial for maintaining reliable performance in high-stakes applications. While traditional RL methods aim to learn a point estimate of the random cumulative cost, distributional RL (DRL) seeks…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-03 Minheng Xiao , Xian Yu , Lei Ying

The use of Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents in practical applications requires the consideration of suboptimal outcomes, depending on the familiarity of the agent with its environment. This is especially important in safety-critical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-07 Frederik Schubert , Theresa Eimer , Bodo Rosenhahn , Marius Lindauer

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-11 Qixin Wang , Hao Cao , Jian-Qiang Hu , Mingjie Hu , Li Xia

We study learning algorithms that seek to minimize the conditional value-at-risk (CVaR), when all the learner knows is that the losses incurred may be heavy-tailed. We begin by studying a general-purpose estimator of CVaR for potentially…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-06-04 Matthew J. Holland , El Mehdi Haress

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-02 Thibaut Théate , Damien Ernst

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

Conditional value-at-risk (CVaR) precisely characterizes the influence that rare, catastrophic events can exert over decisions. Such characterizations are important for both normal decision-making and for psychiatric conditions such as…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-11-15 Chris Gagne , Peter Dayan

Current value-based multi-agent reinforcement learning methods optimize individual Q values to guide individuals' behaviours via centralized training with decentralized execution (CTDE). However, such expected, i.e., risk-neutral, Q value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-23 Wei Qiu , Xinrun Wang , Runsheng Yu , Xu He , Rundong Wang , Bo An , Svetlana Obraztsova , Zinovi Rabinovich

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has recently received significant attention from the process systems engineering and control communities. Recent works have investigated the application of RL to identify optimal scheduling decision in the…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-03-11 Max Mowbray , Dongda Zhang , Ehecatl Antonio Del Rio Chanona

Risk-averse reinforcement learning (RARL) is critical for decision-making under uncertainty, which is especially valuable in high-stake applications. However, most existing works focus on risk measures, e.g., conditional value-at-risk…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-16 Yudong Luo , Yangchen Pan , Jiaqi Tan , Pascal Poupart

We model human decision-making behaviors in a risk-taking task using inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) for the purposes of understanding real human decision making under risk. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work applying…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-14 Quanying Liu , Haiyan Wu , Anqi Liu

This paper presents sensitivity analyses of resilience-based active distribution system planning solutions with respect to different parameters. The distribution system planning problem is formulated as a two-stage risk-averse stochastic…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-11-28 Abodh Poudyal , Anamika Dubey

Optimizing risk measures such as Value-at-Risk (VaR) and Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR) of a general loss distribution is usually difficult, because 1) the loss function might lack structural properties such as convexity or…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2016-08-03 Helin Zhu , Joshua Hale , Enlu Zhou

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-10-18 Li Xia , Peter W. Glynn

Value at Risk (VaR) and Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR) have become the most popular measures of market risk in Financial and Insurance fields. However, the estimation of both risk measures is challenging, because it requires the knowledge…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-10-17 Jacinto Martín , M. Isabel Parra , Eva L. Sanjuán , Mario M. Pizarro

Learning a predictive model of the mean return, or value function, plays a critical role in many reinforcement learning algorithms. Distributional reinforcement learning (DRL) has been shown to improve performance by modeling the value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Ju-Seung Byun , Andrew Perrault