Related papers: A Simple Mixture Policy Parameterization for Impro…
Planning through crowded environments under uncertain obstacle motions remains difficult, as stochastic interactions often induce overly conservative behavior or reduced efficiency. To address this challenge, we propose an end-to-end risk…
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…
Optimal portfolio allocation is often formulated as a constrained risk problem, where one aims to minimize a risk measure subject to some performance constraints. This paper presents new Bayesian Optimization algorithms for such constrained…
Policy gradient (PG) gives rise to a rich class of reinforcement learning (RL) methods. Recently, there has been an emerging trend to accelerate the existing PG methods such as REINFORCE by the \emph{variance reduction} techniques. However,…
We propose an iterative gradient-based algorithm to efficiently solve the portfolio selection problem with multiple spectral risk constraints. Since the conditional value at risk (CVaR) is a special case of the spectral risk measure, our…
Estimating a policy that maps states to actions is a central problem in reinforcement learning. Traditionally, policies are inferred from the so called value functions (VFs), but exact VF computation suffers from the curse of…
This paper studies mean-risk portfolio optimization models using the conditional value-at-risk (CVaR) as a risk measure. We also employ a cardinality constraint for limiting the number of invested assets. Solving such a…
We develop a variant of the stochastic prox-linear method for minimizing the Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR) objective. CVaR is a risk measure focused on minimizing worst-case performance, defined as the average of the top quantile of the…
Managing insurance and financial risk when data is limited is a key task in the insurance industry. In this paper, we focus on cases where the risk distribution is modeled as a mixture with some components estimable to high precision or…
Policy gradient (PG) methods are the backbone of many reinforcement learning algorithms due to their good performance in policy optimization problems. As a gradient-based approach, PG methods typically rely on knowledge of the system…
Policy gradient methods, which have been extensively studied in the last decade, offer an effective and efficient framework for reinforcement learning problems. However, their performances can often be unsatisfactory, suffering from…
Policy gradient methods have demonstrated success in reinforcement learning tasks that have high-dimensional continuous state and action spaces. However, policy gradient methods are also notoriously sample inefficient. This can be…
In safety-critical decision-making, the environment may evolve over time, and the learner adjusts its risk level accordingly. This work investigates risk-averse online optimization in dynamic environments with varying risk levels, employing…
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…
Though deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has obtained substantial success, it may encounter catastrophic failures due to the intrinsic uncertainty of both transition and observation. Most of the existing methods for safe reinforcement…
This paper introduces two novel modifications to the Dynamic sAmpling Policy Optimization (DAPO) algorithm [1], approached from a mixed-policy perspective. Standard policy gradient methods can suffer from instability and sample…
Recent advances in policy gradient methods and deep learning have demonstrated their applicability for complex reinforcement learning problems. However, the variance of the performance gradient estimates obtained from the simulation is…
Financial portfolios are often optimized for maximum profit while subject to a constraint formulated in terms of the Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR). This amounts to solving a linear problem. However, in its original formulation this…
The policy gradient approach is a flexible and powerful reinforcement learning method particularly for problems with continuous actions such as robot control. A common challenge in this scenario is how to reduce the variance of policy…
Reinforcement learning (RL) shows great potential in sequential decision-making. At present, mainstream RL algorithms are data-driven, which usually yield better asymptotic performance but much slower convergence compared with model-driven…