Related papers: Near-Optimal Sample Complexity for Iterated CVaR R…

We consider the optimal sample complexity theory of tabular reinforcement learning (RL) for maximizing the infinite horizon discounted reward in a Markov decision process (MDP). Optimal worst-case complexity results have been developed for…

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…

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…

Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR) is a widely used risk metric in applications such as finance. We derive concentration bounds for CVaR estimates, considering separately the cases of light-tailed and heavy-tailed distributions. In the…

Optimizing risk measures such as Value-at-Risk (VaR) and Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR) of a general loss distribution is usually difficult, because 1) the loss function might lack structural properties such as convexity or…

Conditional value at risk (CVaR) is a popular measure for quantifying portfolio risk. Sensitivity analysis of CVaR is very useful in risk management and gradient-based optimization algorithms. In this paper, we study the infinitesimal…

This thesis presents the Conditional Value-at-Risk concept and combines an analysis that covers its application as a risk measure and as a vector norm. For both areas of application the theory is revised in detail and examples are given to…

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…

Continuous-time reinforcement learning (CTRL) provides a principled framework for sequential decision-making in environments where interactions evolve continuously over time. Despite its empirical success, the theoretical understanding of…

Planning through crowded environments under uncertain obstacle motions remains difficult, as stochastic interactions often induce overly conservative behavior or reduced efficiency. To address this challenge, we propose an end-to-end risk…

We consider the problem of learning the optimal action-value function in the discounted-reward Markov decision processes (MDPs). We prove a new PAC bound on the sample-complexity of model-based value iteration algorithm in the presence of…

This paper develops a safety analysis method for stochastic systems that is sensitive to the possibility and severity of rare harmful outcomes. We define risk-sensitive safe sets as sub-level sets of the solution to a non-standard optimal…

The popularity of Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR), a risk functional from finance, has been growing in the control systems community due to its intuitive interpretation and axiomatic foundation. We consider a nonstandard optimal control…

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…

We study the problem of incorporating risk while making combinatorial decisions under uncertainty. We formulate a discrete submodular maximization problem for selecting a set using Conditional-Value-at-Risk (CVaR), a risk metric commonly…

Machine learning (ML) models used in prediction and classification tasks may display performance disparities across population groups determined by sensitive attributes (e.g., race, sex, age). We consider the problem of evaluating the…

In many sequential decision-making problems we may want to manage risk by minimizing some measure of variability in costs in addition to minimizing a standard criterion. Conditional value-at-risk (CVaR) is a relatively new risk measure that…

Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR) is a central tail-risk measure in stochastic structural mechanics, yet its accurate evaluation under high-dimensional, spatially correlated material uncertainty remains computationally prohibitive for…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown exceptional performance across various applications, enabling autonomous agents to learn optimal policies through interaction with their environments. However, traditional RL frameworks often face…

Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR) is a leading tail-risk measure in finance, central to both regulatory and portfolio optimization frameworks. Classical estimation of CVaR and its gradients relies on Monte Carlo simulation, incurring…