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We consider the optimal risk sharing problem with a continuum of agents, modeled via a non-atomic measure space. Individual preferences are not assumed to be convex. We show the multiplicity of agents induces the value function to be…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-09-12 Vasily Melnikov

We develop a framework for convexifying a fairly general class of optimization problems. Under additional assumptions, we analyze the suboptimality of the solution to the convexified problem relative to the original nonconvex problem and…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2014-06-04 Krishnamurthy Dvijotham , Maryam Fazel , Emanuel Todorov

Actor-critic (AC) methods are widely used in reinforcement learning (RL) and benefit from the flexibility of using any policy gradient method as the actor and value-based method as the critic. The critic is usually trained by minimizing the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-01 Sharan Vaswani , Amirreza Kazemi , Reza Babanezhad , Nicolas Le Roux

Direct policy search serves as one of the workhorses in modern reinforcement learning (RL), and its applications in continuous control tasks have recently attracted increasing attention. In this work, we investigate the convergence theory…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-01-03 Kaiqing Zhang , Xiangyuan Zhang , Bin Hu , Tamer Başar

We develop a method for computing policies in Markov decision processes with risk-sensitive measures subject to temporal logic constraints. Specifically, we use a particular risk-sensitive measure from cumulative prospect theory, which has…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-04-21 Murat Cubuktepe , Ufuk Topcu

We propose a convex formulation for a trading system with the Conditional Value-at-Risk as a risk-adjusted performance measure under the notion of Direct Reinforcement Learning. Due to convexity, the proposed approach can uncover a…

Trading and Market Microstructure · Quantitative Finance 2021-09-30 Ali Al-Ameer , Khaled Alshehri

Autonomous cyber-physical agents and systems play an increasingly large role in our lives. To ensure that agents behave in ways aligned with the values of the societies in which they operate, we must develop techniques that allow these…

Training sophisticated agents for optimal decision-making under uncertainty has been key to the rapid development of modern autonomous systems across fields. Notably, model-free reinforcement learning (RL) has enabled decision-making agents…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-21 Thomas Banker , Ali Mesbah

The primary goal of reinforcement learning is to develop decision-making policies that prioritize optimal performance without considering risk or safety. In contrast, safe reinforcement learning aims to mitigate or avoid unsafe states. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-13 Zahra Shahrooei , Ali Baheri

Real-world applications require RL algorithms to act safely. During learning process, it is likely that the agent executes sub-optimal actions that may lead to unsafe/poor states of the system. Exploration is particularly brittle in…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-06-17 Elena Smirnova , Elvis Dohmatob , Jérémie Mary

In this paper, we propose a distributed off-policy actor critic method to solve multi-agent reinforcement learning problems. Specifically, we assume that all agents keep local estimates of the global optimal policy parameter and update…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-25 Yan Zhang , Michael M. Zavlanos

Automated vehicle control using reinforcement learning (RL) has attracted significant attention due to its potential to learn driving policies through environment interaction. However, RL agents often face training challenges in sample…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-09-08 Zhihao Zhang , Chengyang Peng , Ekim Yurtsever , Keith A. Redmill

Risk-averse Constrained Reinforcement Learning (RaCRL) aims to learn policies that minimise the likelihood of rare and catastrophic constraint violations caused by an environment's inherent randomness. In general, risk-aversion leads to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-28 James McCarthy , Radu Marinescu , Elizabeth Daly , Ivana Dusparic

Reinforcement learning suffers from limitations in real practices primarily due to the number of required interactions with virtual environments. It results in a challenging problem because we are implausible to obtain a local optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-28 Qizhen Wu , Kexin Liu , Lei Chen

Learning a risk-aware policy is essential but rather challenging in unstructured robotic tasks. Safe reinforcement learning methods open up new possibilities to tackle this problem. However, the conservative policy updates make it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-15 Linrui Zhang , Zichen Yan , Li Shen , Shoujie Li , Xueqian Wang , Dacheng Tao

As autonomous robots move into complex, dynamic real-world environments, they must learn to navigate safely in real time, yet anticipating all possible behaviors is infeasible. We propose a composable, model-free reinforcement learning…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-02-16 Xinhuan Sang , Abdelrahman Abdelgawad , Roberto Tron

This scientific paper propose a novel portfolio optimization model using an improved deep reinforcement learning algorithm. The objective function of the optimization model is the weighted sum of the expectation and value at risk(VaR) of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-30 Boyi Jin

Traditional reinforcement learning agents learn from experience, past or present, gained through interaction with their environment. Our approach synthesizes experience, without requiring an agent to interact with their environment, by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-01 Chris R. Serrano , Michael A. Warren

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-06-05 Jack Umenberger , Mina Ferizbegovic , Thomas B. Schön , Håkan Hjalmarsson

The literature on Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) typically assumes that humans take actions in order to minimize the expected value of a cost function, i.e., that humans are risk neutral. Yet, in practice, humans are often far from…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-03-23 Sumeet Singh , Jonathan Lacotte , Anirudha Majumdar , Marco Pavone