Related papers: Risk-averse learning with delayed feedback
Online learning with delayed feedback has received increasing attention recently due to its several applications in distributed, web-based learning problems. In this paper we provide a systematic study of the topic, and analyze the effect…
Although Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms have found tremendous success in simulated domains, they often cannot directly be applied to physical systems, especially in cases where there are hard constraints to satisfy (e.g. on safety…
This paper proposes a unified control framework based on Response-Aware Risk-Constrained Control Barrier Function for dynamic safety boundary control of vehicles. Addressing the problem of physical model parameter mismatch, the framework…
Optimizing Conditional Value-at-risk (CVaR) using policy gradient (a.k.a CVaR-PG) faces significant challenges of sample inefficiency. This inefficiency stems from the fact that it focuses on tail-end performance and overlooks many sampled…
Risk-averse reinforcement learning (RARL) is critical for decision-making under uncertainty, which is especially valuable in high-stake applications. However, most existing works focus on risk measures, e.g., conditional value-at-risk…
Robust Markov Decision Processes (RMDPs) have received significant research interest, offering an alternative to standard Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) that often assume fixed transition probabilities. RMDPs address this by optimizing…
Motivated by applications in clinical trials and finance, we study the problem of online convex optimization (with bandit feedback) where the decision maker is risk-averse. We provide two algorithms to solve this problem. The first one is a…
In the classical Reinforcement Learning (RL) setting, one aims to find a policy that maximizes its expected return. This objective may be inappropriate in safety-critical domains such as healthcare or autonomous driving, where intrinsic…
The entropic value-at-risk (EVaR) is a new coherent risk measure, which is an upper bound for both the value-at-risk (VaR) and conditional value-at-risk (CVaR). As important properties, the EVaR is strongly monotone over its domain and…
There are many algorithms for regret minimisation in episodic reinforcement learning. This problem is well-understood from a theoretical perspective, providing that the sequences of states, actions and rewards associated with each episode…
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…
Reinforcement learning algorithms often suffer from slow convergence due to sparse reward signals, particularly in complex environments where feedback is delayed or infrequent. This paper introduces the Psychological Regret Model (PRM), a…
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…
Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) policies have been shown to be vulnerable to small adversarial noise in observations. Such adversarial noise can have disastrous consequences in safety-critical environments. For instance, a self-driving…
Active learning from demonstration allows a robot to query a human for specific types of input to achieve efficient learning. Existing work has explored a variety of active query strategies; however, to our knowledge, none of these…
Constrained optimization provides a common framework for dealing with conflicting objectives in reinforcement learning (RL). In most of these settings, the objectives (and constraints) are expressed though the expected accumulated reward.…
Contextual bandits with average-case statistical guarantees are inadequate in risk-averse situations because they might trade off degraded worst-case behaviour for better average performance. Designing a risk-averse contextual bandit is…
Action and observation delays commonly occur in many Reinforcement Learning applications, such as remote control scenarios. We study the anatomy of randomly delayed environments, and show that partially resampling trajectory fragments in…
We study Bayesian persuasion when the receiver evaluates actions by reward-side Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR) rather than expected utility. CVaR preferences break the standard action-based direct-recommendation reduction: merging signals…
We consider a control problem for a finite-state Markov system whose performance is evaluated by a coherent Markov risk measure. For each policy, the risk of a state is approximated by a function of its features, thus leading to a…