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The entropic value-at-risk (EVaR) is a new coherent risk measure, which is an upper bound for both the value-at-risk (VaR) and conditional value-at-risk (CVaR). As important properties, the EVaR is strongly monotone over its domain and…
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…
Contextual bandits with linear payoffs, which are also known as linear bandits, provide a powerful alternative for solving practical problems of sequential decisions, e.g., online advertisements. In the era of big data, contextual data…
We consider the problem of learning to play a repeated multi-agent game with an unknown reward function. Single player online learning algorithms attain strong regret bounds when provided with full information feedback, which unfortunately…
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…
Learning to make decisions from observed data in dynamic environments remains a problem of fundamental importance in a number of fields, from artificial intelligence and robotics, to medicine and finance. This paper concerns the problem of…
Although Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms have found tremendous success in simulated domains, they often cannot directly be applied to physical systems, especially in cases where there are hard constraints to satisfy (e.g. on safety…
In this paper, we consider a risk-averse multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem where the goal is to learn a policy that minimizes the risk of low expected return, as opposed to maximizing the expected return itself, which is the objective in the…
Contextual bandit learning is a reinforcement learning problem where the learner repeatedly receives a set of features (context), takes an action and receives a reward based on the action and context. We consider this problem under a…
This paper studies a class of strongly monotone games involving non-cooperative agents that optimize their own time-varying cost functions. We assume that the agents can observe other agents' historical actions and choose actions that best…
A contextual bandit problem is studied in a highly non-stationary environment, which is ubiquitous in various recommender systems due to the time-varying interests of users. Two models with disjoint and hybrid payoffs are considered to…
Robot navigation in dynamic, crowded environments poses a significant challenge due to the inherent uncertainties in the obstacle model. In this work, we propose a risk-adaptive approach based on the Conditional Value-at-Risk Barrier…
We consider Contextual Bandits with Concave Rewards (CBCR), a multi-objective bandit problem where the desired trade-off between the rewards is defined by a known concave objective function, and the reward vector depends on an observed…
We study the problem of incorporating risk while making combinatorial decisions under uncertainty. We formulate a discrete submodular maximization problem for selecting a set using Conditional-Value-at-Risk (CVaR), a risk metric commonly…
We consider the problem of controlling a known linear dynamical system under stochastic noise, adversarially chosen costs, and bandit feedback. Unlike the full feedback setting where the entire cost function is revealed after each decision,…
Non-stationary multi-armed bandits enable agents to adapt to changing environments by incorporating mechanisms to detect and respond to shifts in reward distributions, making them well-suited for dynamic settings. However, existing…
We study an online learning problem with long-term budget constraints in the adversarial setting. In this problem, at each round $t$, the learner selects an action from a convex decision set, after which the adversary reveals a cost…
Value-at-Risk (VaR) is an institutional measure of risk favored by financial regulators. VaR may be interpreted as a quantile of future portfolio values conditional on the information available, where the most common quantile used is 95%.…
In this paper, we study an inverse reinforcement learning problem that involves learning the reward function of a learning agent using trajectory data collected while this agent is learning its optimal policy. To address this problem, we…
This paper concerns the problem of learning control policies for an unknown linear dynamical system to minimize a quadratic cost function. We present a method, based on convex optimization, that accomplishes this task robustly: i.e., we…