Related papers: Risk-averse Total-reward MDPs with ERM and EVaR
In this paper, we consider reinforcement learning of Markov Decision Processes (MDP) with peak constraints, where an agent chooses a policy to optimize an objective and at the same time satisfy additional constraints. The agent has to take…
Reasoning ability has become a defining capability of Large Language Models (LLMs), with Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) emerging as a key paradigm to enhance it. However, RLVR training often suffers from policy…
This paper investigates the optimization problem of an infinite stage discrete time Markov decision process (MDP) with a long-run average metric considering both mean and variance of rewards together. Such performance metric is important…
In reinforcement learning, the discount factor $\gamma$ controls the agent's effective planning horizon. Traditionally, this parameter was considered part of the MDP; however, as deep reinforcement learning algorithms tend to become…
While most approaches to the problem of Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) focus on estimating a reward function that best explains an expert agent's policy or demonstrated behavior on a control task, it is often the case that such…
Safety in stochastic control systems, which are subject to random noise with a known probability distribution, aims to compute policies that satisfy predefined operational constraints with high confidence throughout the uncertain evolution…
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…
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…
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…
Efficient exploration remains a central challenge in reinforcement learning, serving as a useful pretraining objective for data collection, particularly when an external reward function is unavailable. A principled formulation of the…
In real-world decision-making problems, for instance in the fields of finance, robotics or autonomous driving, keeping uncertainty under control is as important as maximizing expected returns. Risk aversion has been addressed in the…
This paper studies the problem of risk-averse receding horizon motion planning for agents with uncertain dynamics, in the presence of stochastic, dynamic obstacles. We propose a model predictive control (MPC) scheme that formulates the…
We study risk-sensitive planning under partial observability using the dynamic risk measure Iterated Conditional Value-at-Risk (ICVaR). A policy evaluation algorithm for ICVaR is developed with finite-time performance guarantees that do not…
Reinforcement learning with verifiable reward has recently emerged as a central paradigm for post-training large language models (LLMs); however, prevailing mean-based methods, such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), suffer from…
In reinforcement learning, two objective functions have been developed extensively in the literature: discounted and averaged rewards. The generalization to an entropy-regularized setting has led to improved robustness and exploration for…
This paper is devoted to studying constrained continuous-time Markov decision processes (MDPs) in the class of randomized policies depending on state histories. The transition rates may be unbounded, the reward and costs are admitted to be…
Popular Maximum Entropy Inverse Reinforcement Learning approaches require the computation of expected state visitation frequencies for the optimal policy under an estimate of the reward function. This usually requires intermediate value…
We propose a provably correct Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) algorithm for solving risk-aware Markov decision processes (MDPs) with entropic risk measure (ERM) objectives. We provide a non-asymptotic analysis of our proposed algorithm,…
In order to model risk aversion in reinforcement learning, an emerging line of research adapts familiar algorithms to optimize coherent risk functionals, a class that includes conditional value-at-risk (CVaR). Because optimizing the…
The aim of this paper is to investigate risk-averse and distributionally robust modeling of Stochastic Optimal Control (SOC) and Markov Decision Process (MDP). We discuss construction of conditional nested risk functionals, a particular…