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Related papers: A Risk-Sensitive Approach to Policy Optimization

200 papers

In this paper, we study a novel episodic risk-sensitive Reinforcement Learning (RL) problem, named Iterated CVaR RL, which aims to maximize the tail of the reward-to-go at each step, and focuses on tightly controlling the risk of getting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-12 Yihan Du , Siwei Wang , Longbo Huang

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) is a promising outer-loop intelligence paradigm which can deploy problem solving strategies for complex tasks. Consequently, DRL has been utilized for several scientific applications, specifically in cases…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-05 Sahil Bhola , Suraj Pawar , Prasanna Balaprakash , Romit Maulik

The recently proposed distributional approach to reinforcement learning (DiRL) is centered on learning the distribution of the reward-to-go, often referred to as the value distribution. In this work, we show that the distributional Bellman…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-08-07 Dror Freirich , Ron Meir , Aviv Tamar

Improving the sample efficiency of reinforcement learning algorithms requires effective exploration. Following the principle of $\textit{optimism in the face of uncertainty}$ (OFU), we train a separate exploration policy to maximize the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-23 Jiachen Li , Shuo Cheng , Zhenyu Liao , Huayan Wang , William Yang Wang , Qinxun Bai

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

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) and dynamic discrete choice (DDC) models explain sequential decision-making by recovering reward functions that rationalize observed behavior. Flexible IRL methods typically rely on machine learning but…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-01 Lars van der Laan , Aurelien Bibaut , Nathan Kallus

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has shown its promising capabilities to learn optimal policies directly from trial and error. However, learning can be hindered if the goal of the learning, defined by the reward function, is "not optimal".…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-10-09 Yizheng Zhang , Andre Rosendo

Risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RL) has garnered significant attention in recent years due to the growing interest in deploying RL agents in real-world scenarios. A critical aspect of risk awareness involves modeling highly rare risk…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-30 Karthik Somayaji NS , Yu Wang , Malachi Schram , Jan Drgona , Mahantesh Halappanavar , Frank Liu , Peng Li

Meta-reinforcement learning algorithms provide a data-driven way to acquire policies that quickly adapt to many tasks with varying rewards or dynamics functions. However, learned meta-policies are often effective only on the exact task…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-13 Anurag Ajay , Abhishek Gupta , Dibya Ghosh , Sergey Levine , Pulkit Agrawal

We study the estimation of risk-sensitive policies in reinforcement learning problems defined by a Markov Decision Process (MDPs) whose state and action spaces are countably finite. Prior efforts are predominately afflicted by computational…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-03-02 Junyu Zhang , Amrit Singh Bedi , Mengdi Wang , Alec Koppel

In constrained reinforcement learning (C-RL), an agent seeks to learn from the environment a policy that maximizes the expected cumulative reward while satisfying minimum requirements in secondary cumulative reward constraints. Several…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-06 Tianqi Zheng , Pengcheng You , Enrique Mallada

Distributional reinforcement learning algorithms have attempted to utilize estimated uncertainty for exploration, such as optimism in the face of uncertainty. However, using the estimated variance for optimistic exploration may cause biased…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-06 Taehyun Cho , Seungyub Han , Heesoo Lee , Kyungjae Lee , Jungwoo Lee

In many real-world settings, reinforcement learning systems suffer performance degradation when the environment encountered at deployment differs from that observed during training. Distributionally robust reinforcement learning (DR-RL)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Debamita Ghosh , George K. Atia , Yue Wang

The objectives of option hedging/trading extend beyond mere protection against downside risks, with a desire to seek gains also driving agent's strategies. In this study, we showcase the potential of robust risk-aware reinforcement learning…

Computational Finance · Quantitative Finance 2023-12-27 David Wu , Sebastian Jaimungal

Portfolio Selection is an important real-world financial task and has attracted extensive attention in artificial intelligence communities. This task, however, has two main difficulties: (i) the non-stationary price series and complex asset…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-09 Yifan Zhang , Peilin Zhao , Qingyao Wu , Bin Li , Junzhou Huang , Mingkui Tan

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) algorithms have recently made significant strides in improving network performance. Nonetheless, their practical use is still limited in the absence of safe exploration and safe decision-making. In the…

Networking and Internet Architecture · Computer Science 2024-01-12 Lam Dinh , Pham Tran Anh Quang , Jérémie Leguay

Training a deep neural network to maximize a target objective has become the standard recipe for successful machine learning over the last decade. These networks can be optimized with supervised learning, if the target objective is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-12 Bernhard Jaeger , Andreas Geiger

This paper presents the first deep reinforcement learning (DRL) framework to estimate the optimal Dynamic Treatment Regimes from observational medical data. This framework is more flexible and adaptive for high dimensional action and state…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-01-30 Ning Liu , Ying Liu , Brent Logan , Zhiyuan Xu , Jian Tang , Yanzhi Wang

In recent years, Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has become a popular paradigm in machine learning due to its successful applications to real-world and complex systems. However, even the state-of-the-art DRL models have been shown to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Davide Corsi , Guy Amir , Guy Katz , Alessandro Farinelli

We study the robustness of deep reinforcement learning algorithms against distribution shifts within contextual multi-stage stochastic combinatorial optimization problems from the operations research domain. In this context, risk-sensitive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-16 Tobias Enders , James Harrison , Maximilian Schiffer