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The goal of robust reinforcement learning (RL) is to learn a policy that is robust against the uncertainty in model parameters. Parameter uncertainty commonly occurs in many real-world RL applications due to simulator modeling errors,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-19 Kishan Panaganti , Zaiyan Xu , Dileep Kalathil , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh

We propose risk-sensitive reinforcement learning algorithms catering to three families of risk measures, namely expectiles, utility-based shortfall risk and optimized certainty equivalent risk. For each risk measure, in the context of a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Sumedh Gupte , Shrey Rakeshkumar Patel , Soumen Pachal , Prashanth L. A. , Sanjay P. Bhat

This paper bridges reinforcement learning (RL) and risk-sensitive stochastic control by introducing a tractable exploration mechanism for policy search in risk-sensitive portfolio management, with known and unknown model parameters, that…

Portfolio Management · Quantitative Finance 2026-03-03 Sebastien Lleo , Wolfgang Runggaldier

Robust reinforcement learning (RL) aims to find a policy that optimizes the worst-case performance in the face of uncertainties. In this paper, we focus on action robust RL with the probabilistic policy execution uncertainty, in which,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-21 Guanlin Liu , Zhihan Zhou , Han Liu , Lifeng Lai

Risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RL) has become a popular tool for controlling the risk of uncertain outcomes and ensuring reliable performance in highly stochastic sequential decision-making problems. While it has been shown that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Xian Yu , Lei Ying

We study the robustness of deep reinforcement learning algorithms against distribution shifts within contextual multi-stage stochastic combinatorial optimization problems from the operations research domain. In this context, risk-sensitive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-16 Tobias Enders , James Harrison , Maximilian Schiffer

This paper presents a risk-aware safe reinforcement learning (RL) control design for stochastic discrete-time linear systems. Rather than using a safety certifier to myopically intervene with the RL controller, a risk-informed safe…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-05-16 Babak Esmaeili , Nariman Niknejad , Hamidreza Modares

We establish a new connection between value and policy based reinforcement learning (RL) based on a relationship between softmax temporal value consistency and policy optimality under entropy regularization. Specifically, we show that…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-11-27 Ofir Nachum , Mohammad Norouzi , Kelvin Xu , Dale Schuurmans

Model-free deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have achieved tremendous success on a range of challenging tasks. However, safety concerns remain when these methods are deployed on real-world applications, necessitating risk-aware…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Alonso Granados , Jason Pacheco

Direct policy search serves as one of the workhorses in modern reinforcement learning (RL), and its applications in continuous control tasks have recently attracted increasing attention. In this work, we investigate the convergence theory…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-01-03 Kaiqing Zhang , Xiangyuan Zhang , Bin Hu , Tamer Başar

Recently, safe reinforcement learning (RL) with the actor-critic structure for continuous control tasks has received increasing attention. It is still challenging to learn a near-optimal control policy with safety and convergence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-06 Xinglong Zhang , Yaoqian Peng , Biao Luo , Wei Pan , Xin Xu , Haibin Xie

Real-world reinforcement learning (RL) problems often demand that agents behave safely by obeying a set of designed constraints. We address the challenge of safe RL by coupling a safety guide based on model predictive control (MPC) with a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-30 Samuel Pfrommer , Tanmay Gautam , Alec Zhou , Somayeh Sojoudi

Recent work has led to the development of an elegant theory of Linearly Solvable Markov Decision Processes (LMDPs) and related Path-Integral Control Problems. Traditionally, MDPs have been formulated using stochastic policies and a control…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2012-02-20 Krishnamurthy Dvijotham , Emanuel Todorov

This paper develops the first policy gradient method with global optimality guarantee and complexity analysis for robust reinforcement learning under model mismatch. Robust reinforcement learning is to learn a policy robust to model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-17 Yue Wang , Shaofeng Zou

This paper addresses the problem of maintaining safety during training in Reinforcement Learning (RL), such that the safety constraint violations are bounded at any point during learning. In a variety of RL applications the safety of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-19 Rohan Mitta , Hosein Hasanbeig , Jun Wang , Daniel Kroening , Yiannis Kantaros , Alessandro Abate

Accounting for the non-normality of asset returns remains challenging in robust portfolio optimization. In this article, we tackle this problem by assessing the risk of the portfolio through the "amount of randomness" conveyed by its…

Portfolio Management · Quantitative Finance 2018-07-03 Nathan Lassance , Frédéric Vrins

Risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RL) has garnered significant attention in recent years due to the growing interest in deploying RL agents in real-world scenarios. A critical aspect of risk awareness involves modeling highly rare risk…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-30 Karthik Somayaji NS , Yu Wang , Malachi Schram , Jan Drgona , Mahantesh Halappanavar , Frank Liu , Peng Li

The optimality and sensitivity of the empirical risk minimization problem with relative entropy regularization (ERM-RER) are investigated for the case in which the reference is a sigma-finite measure instead of a probability measure. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-15 Samir M. Perlaza , Gaetan Bisson , Iñaki Esnaola , Alain Jean-Marie , Stefano Rini

Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) are known to be universal approximators of dynamic systems under fairly mild and general assumptions. However, RNNs usually suffer from the issues of vanishing and exploding gradients in standard RNN…

Signal Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-10-28 Shashank Jere , Lizhong Zheng , Karim Said , Lingjia Liu

We develop a framework for interacting with uncertain environments in reinforcement learning (RL) by leveraging preferences in the form of utility functions. We claim that there is value in considering different risk measures during…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-23 Hannes Eriksson , Christos Dimitrakakis