Related papers: Risk-averse Learning with Non-Stationary Distribut…
Non-stationary online learning has drawn much attention in recent years. Despite considerable progress, dynamic regret minimization has primarily focused on convex functions, leaving the functions with stronger curvature (e.g., squared or…
We consider un-discounted reinforcement learning (RL) in Markov decision processes (MDPs) under drifting non-stationarity, i.e., both the reward and state transition distributions are allowed to evolve over time, as long as their respective…
We study the problems of offline and online contextual optimization with feedback information, where instead of observing the loss, we observe, after-the-fact, the optimal action an oracle with full knowledge of the objective function would…
Distributionally robust optimization (DRO) is a widely-used approach to learn models that are robust against distribution shift. Compared with the standard optimization setting, the objective function in DRO is more difficult to optimize,…
On-policy imitation learning algorithms such as DAgger evolve a robot control policy by executing it, measuring performance (loss), obtaining corrective feedback from a supervisor, and generating the next policy. As the loss between…
Regret minimization is treated as the golden rule in the traditional study of online learning. However, regret minimization algorithms tend to converge to the static optimum, thus being suboptimal for changing environments. To address this…
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 study online learning in adversarial nonstationary environments. Since the future can be very different from the past, a critical challenge is to gracefully forget the history while new data comes in. To formalize this intuition, we…
CVaR (Conditional Value at Risk) is a risk metric widely used in finance. However, dynamically optimizing CVaR is difficult since it is not a standard Markov decision process (MDP) and the principle of dynamic programming fails. In this…
We consider distributed online convex optimization problems, where the distributed system consists of various computing units connected through a time-varying communication graph. In each time step, each computing unit selects a constrained…
We develop an approach for solving time-consistent risk-sensitive stochastic optimization problems using model-free reinforcement learning (RL). Specifically, we assume agents assess the risk of a sequence of random variables using dynamic…
Companies try to maximize their profits by recovering returned products of highly uncertain quality and quantity. In this paper, a reverse logistics network for an Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) is presented. Returned products are…
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…
We study a class of stochastic optimal design problems for elliptic partial differential equations in divergence form, where the coefficients represent mixtures of two conducting materials. The objective is to minimize a generalized risk…
We investigate constrained online convex optimization, in which decisions must belong to a fixed and typically complicated domain, and are required to approximately satisfy additional time-varying constraints over the long term. In this…
Safe reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn policies that satisfy certain constraints before deploying them to safety-critical applications. Previous primal-dual style approaches suffer from instability issues and lack optimality…
In a wide variety of sequential decision making problems, it can be important to estimate the impact of rare events in order to minimize risk exposure. A popular risk measure is the conditional value-at-risk (CVaR), which is commonly…
Reducing the variance of the gradient estimator is known to improve the convergence rate of stochastic gradient-based optimization and sampling algorithms. One way of achieving variance reduction is to design importance sampling strategies.…
In this paper, we study online convex optimization in dynamic environments, and aim to bound the dynamic regret with respect to any sequence of comparators. Existing work have shown that online gradient descent enjoys an…
This paper considers the problem of online trajectory design under time-varying environments. We formulate the general trajectory optimization problem within the framework of time-varying constrained convex optimization and proposed a novel…