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Related papers: A Risk-Sensitive Approach to Policy Optimization

200 papers

Due to the nature of risk management in learning applicable policies, risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RSRL) has been realized as an important direction. RSRL is usually achieved by learning risk-sensitive objectives characterized by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Ruiwen Zhou , Minghuan Liu , Kan Ren , Xufang Luo , Weinan Zhang , Dongsheng Li

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) presents distinct challenges as it relies solely on observational data. A central concern in this context is ensuring the safety of the learned policy by quantifying uncertainties associated with various…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-03 Xiaocong Chen , Siyu Wang , Tong Yu , Lina Yao

We introduce a novel class of algorithms to efficiently approximate the unknown return distributions in policy evaluation problems from distributional reinforcement learning (DRL). The proposed distributional dynamic programming algorithms…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-07-22 Julian Gerstenberg , Ralph Neininger , Denis Spiegel

During initial iterations of training in most Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms, agents perform a significant number of random exploratory steps. In the real world, this can limit the practicality of these algorithms as it can lead to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-17 Ashish Kumar Jayant , Shalabh Bhatnagar

Aligning generative diffusion models with human preferences via reinforcement learning (RL) is critical yet challenging. Most existing algorithms are often vulnerable to reward hacking, such as quality degradation, over-stylization, or…

Distributional reinforcement learning (DRL) enhances the understanding of the effects of the randomness in the environment by letting agents learn the distribution of a random return, rather than its expected value as in standard…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-03-26 Zifan Wang , Yulong Gao , Siyi Wang , Michael M. Zavlanos , Alessandro Abate , Karl H. Johansson

Many challenging real-world problems require the deployment of ensembles multiple complementary learning models to reach acceptable performance levels. While effective, applying the entire ensemble to every sample is costly and often…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2022-09-20 Orel Lavie , Asaf Shabtai , Gilad Katz

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has achieved great success in solving complicated decision-making problems. Despite the successes, DRL is frequently criticized for many reasons, e.g., data inefficient, inflexible and intractable reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-07 Weiqin Chen

In the ever-changing and intricate landscape of financial markets, portfolio optimisation remains a formidable challenge for investors and asset managers. Conventional methods often struggle to capture the complex dynamics of market…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-09 Himanshu Choudhary , Arishi Orra , Manoj Thakur

We revisit the estimation bias in policy gradients for the discounted episodic Markov decision process (MDP) from Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) perspective. The objective is formulated theoretically as the expected returns discounted…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-13 Haoxuan Pan , Deheng Ye , Xiaoming Duan , Qiang Fu , Wei Yang , Jianping He , Mingfei Sun

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) faces significant challenges in addressing the hard-exploration problems in tasks with sparse or deceptive rewards and large state spaces. These challenges severely limit the practical application of DRL.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-03 Guojian Wang , Faguo Wu , Xiao Zhang , Ning Guo , Zhiming Zheng

We propose policy gradient algorithms for solving a risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RL) problem in on-policy as well as off-policy settings. We consider episodic Markov decision processes, and model the risk using the broad class of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-25 Nithia Vijayan , Prashanth L. A

We study risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RL), a crucial field due to its ability to enhance decision-making in scenarios where it is essential to manage uncertainty and minimize potential adverse outcomes. Particularly, our work…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-11 Dake Zhang , Boxiang Lyu , Shuang Qiu , Mladen Kolar , Tong Zhang

Traditional economic models often rely on fixed assumptions about market dynamics, limiting their ability to capture the complexities and stochastic nature of real-world scenarios. However, reality is more complex and includes noise, making…

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has proven extremely useful in a large variety of application domains. However, even successful DRL-based software can exhibit highly undesirable behavior. This is due to DRL training being based on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-12 Ophir M. Carmel , Guy Katz

Researchers have demonstrated that Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) is a powerful tool for finding policies that perform well on complex robotic systems. However, these policies are often unpredictable and can induce highly variable…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-03-08 Sean Gillen , Asutay Ozmen , Katie Byl

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) suffers from uncertainties and inaccuracies in the observation signal in realworld applications. Adversarial attack is an effective method for evaluating the robustness of DRL agents. However, existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-09 Tianyang Duan , Zongyuan Zhang , Zheng Lin , Yue Gao , Ling Xiong , Yong Cui , Hongbin Liang , Xianhao Chen , Heming Cui , Dong Huang

We study a robust alternative to empirical risk minimization called distributionally robust learning (DRL), in which one learns to perform against an adversary who can choose the data distribution from a specified set of distributions. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-19 Charlie Frogner , Sebastian Claici , Edward Chien , Justin Solomon

Distributional reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful framework increasingly adopted in safety-critical domains for its ability to optimize risk-sensitive objectives. However, the role of the discount factor is often overlooked, as it is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-05 Mehrdad Moghimi , Anthony Coache , Hyejin Ku

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a well-established framework for sequential decision-making in complex environments. However, state-of-the-art Deep RL (DRL) algorithms typically require large training datasets and often struggle to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-13 Celeste Veronese , Alessandro Farinelli , Daniele Meli