Related papers: Risk-averse Total-reward MDPs with ERM and EVaR

We study risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RL) based on an entropic risk measure in episodic non-stationary Markov decision processes (MDPs). Both the reward functions and the state transition kernels are unknown and allowed to vary…

Considering the continuous-time Mean-Variance (MV) portfolio optimization problem, we study a regime-switching market setting and apply reinforcement learning (RL) techniques to assist informed exploration within the control space. We…

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR), particularly Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), has advanced LLM reasoning. However, GRPO suffers from three credit assignment failures: uniform token-level granularity that…

Motivated by applications in risk-sensitive reinforcement learning, we study mean-variance optimization in a discounted reward Markov Decision Process (MDP). Specifically, we analyze a Temporal Difference (TD) learning algorithm with linear…

We derive bounds on the sample complexity of empirical risk minimization (ERM) in the context of minimizing non-convex risks that admit the strict saddle property. Recent progress in non-convex optimization has yielded efficient algorithms…

Model-based reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms allow us to combine model-generated data with those collected from interaction with the real system in order to alleviate the data efficiency problem in RL. However, designing such…

We use the Reward Biased Maximum Likelihood Estimation (RBMLE) algorithm to learn optimal policies for constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs). We analyze the learning regrets of RBMLE.

In this paper, we study the stochastic combinatorial multi-armed bandit problem under semi-bandit feedback. While much work has been done on algorithms that optimize the expected reward for linear as well as some general reward functions,…

Motivated by many application problems, we consider Markov decision processes (MDPs) with a general loss function and unknown parameters. To mitigate the epistemic uncertainty associated with unknown parameters, we take a Bayesian approach…

This paper studies the risk-averse mean-variance optimization in infinite-horizon discounted Markov decision processes (MDPs). The involved variance metric concerns reward variability during the whole process, and future deviations are…

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…

With the increasing pace of automation, modern robotic systems need to act in stochastic, non-stationary, partially observable environments. A range of algorithms for finding parameterized policies that optimize for long-term average…

Value iteration is a fundamental algorithm for solving Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). It computes the maximal $n$-step payoff by iterating $n$ times a recurrence equation which is naturally associated to the MDP. At the same time, value…

Entropic risk (ERisk) is an established risk measure in finance, quantifying risk by an exponential re-weighting of rewards. We study ERisk for the first time in the context of turn-based stochastic games with the total reward objective.…

This paper presents a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) framework for dynamic portfolio optimization under market uncertainty and risk. The proposed model integrates a Sharpe ratio-based reward function with direct risk control mechanisms,…

We study reward-free and reward-agnostic exploration in episodic finite-horizon Markov decision processes (MDPs), where an agent explores an unknown environment without observing external rewards. Reward-free exploration aims to enable…

Reinforcement learning (RL) has substantially improved the ability of large language model (LLM) agents to interact with environments and solve multi-turn tasks. However, effective agentic RL remains challenging: sparse outcome-only rewards…

Markov decision processes (MDPs) are used to model a wide variety of applications ranging from game playing over robotics to finance. Their optimal policy typically maximizes the expected sum of rewards given at each step of the decision…

Initial DR studies mainly adopt model predictive control and thus require accurate models of the control problem (e.g., a customer behavior model), which are to a large extent uncertain for the EV scenario. Hence, model-free approaches,…

This paper discusses an alternative explanation for the empirical findings contradicting the positive relationship between risk (variance) and reward (expected return). We show that these contradicting results might be due to the false…