English
Related papers

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

200 papers

Constrained decision-making is essential for designing safe policies in real-world control systems, yet simulated environments often fail to capture real-world adversities. We consider the problem of learning a policy that will maximize the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Sourav Ganguly , Kishan Panaganti , Arnob Ghosh , Adam Wierman

We propose a novel framework to solve risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RL) problems where the agent optimises time-consistent dynamic spectral risk measures. Based on the notion of conditional elicitability, our methodology constructs…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-02 Anthony Coache , Sebastian Jaimungal , Álvaro Cartea

Modern Reinforcement Learning (RL) is commonly applied to practical problems with an enormous number of states, where function approximation must be deployed to approximate either the value function or the policy. The introduction of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-09 Chi Jin , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang , Michael I. Jordan

Low-complexity models such as linear function representation play a pivotal role in enabling sample-efficient reinforcement learning (RL). The current paper pertains to a scenario with value-based linear representation, which postulates the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-19 Gen Li , Yuxin Chen , Yuejie Chi , Yuantao Gu , Yuting Wei

We conduct a non asymptotic study of the Cross Validation (CV) estimate of the generalization risk for learning algorithms dedicated to extreme regions of the covariates space. In this Extreme Value Analysis context, the risk function…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2024-09-12 Anass Aghbalou , Patrice Bertail , François Portier , Anne Sabourin

Value iteration-type methods have been extensively studied for computing a nearly optimal value function in reinforcement learning (RL). Under a generative sampling model, these methods can achieve sharper sample complexity than policy…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-08 Zhichao Jia , Guanghui Lan

A central issue lying at the heart of online reinforcement learning (RL) is data efficiency. While a number of recent works achieved asymptotically minimal regret in online RL, the optimality of these results is only guaranteed in a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-30 Zihan Zhang , Yuxin Chen , Jason D. Lee , Simon S. Du

We present a polynomial-time online algorithm for maximizing the conditional value at risk (CVaR) of a monotone stochastic submodular function. Given $T$ i.i.d. samples from an underlying distribution arriving online, our algorithm produces…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2021-05-21 Tasuku Soma , Yuichi Yoshida

Meta reinforcement learning (RL) allows agents to leverage experience across a distribution of tasks on which the agent can train at will, enabling faster learning of optimal policies on new test tasks. Despite its success in improving…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Tingting Ni , Maryam Kamgarpour

Visual reinforcement learning (RL) suffers from poor sample efficiency due to high-dimensional observations in complex tasks. While existing works have shown that vision-language models (VLMs) can assist RL, they often focus on knowledge…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Canming Xia , Peixi Peng , Guang Tan , Zhan Su , Haoran Xu , Zhenxian Liu , Luntong Li

Constrained reinforcement learning (CRL) has gained significant interest recently, since safety constraints satisfaction is critical for real-world problems. However, existing CRL methods constraining discounted cumulative costs generally…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-08 Dongjie Yu , Haitong Ma , Shengbo Eben Li , Jianyu Chen

When transferring a control policy from simulation to a physical system, the policy needs to be robust to variations in the dynamics to perform well. Commonly, the optimal policy overfits to the approximate model and the corresponding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-27 Michael Lutter , Shie Mannor , Jan Peters , Dieter Fox , Animesh Garg

Balancing exploration and exploitation remains a key challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). State-of-the-art RL algorithms suffer from high sample complexity, particularly in the sparse reward case, where they can do no better than to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-22 Philippe Morere , Gilad Francis , Tom Blau , Fabio Ramos

We develop a fitted value iteration (FVI) method to compute bicausal optimal transport (OT) where couplings have an adapted structure. Based on the dynamic programming formulation, FVI adopts a function class to approximate the value…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-07 Erhan Bayraktar , Bingyan Han

CVaR (Conditional Value at Risk) is a risk metric widely used in finance. However, dynamically optimizing CVaR is difficult since it is not a standard Markov decision process (MDP) and the principle of dynamic programming fails. In this…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-10-18 Li Xia , Peter W. Glynn

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) is a popular and versatile paradigm to learn reward-maximizing policies with safety guarantees. Previous works tend to express the safety constraints in an expectation form due to the ease of implementation,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-18 Chenglin Li , Guangchun Ruan , Hua Geng

We study a continuous-time portfolio optimization problem under an explicit constraint on the Deviation Conditional Value-at-Risk (DCVaR), defined as the difference between the CVaR and the expected terminal wealth. While the mean-CVaR…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-01 Jérôme Lelong , Véronique Maume-Deschamps , William Thevenot

We derive approximation bounds for learning single neuron models using thresholded gradient descent when both the labels and the covariates are possibly corrupted adversarially. We assume the data follows the model $y =…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-09-06 Arvind Rathnashyam , Alex Gittens

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-28 James McCarthy , Radu Marinescu , Elizabeth Daly , Ivana Dusparic

While maximizing expected return is the goal in most reinforcement learning approaches, risk-sensitive objectives such as conditional value at risk (CVaR) are more suitable for many high-stakes applications. However, relatively little is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-06 Ramtin Keramati , Christoph Dann , Alex Tamkin , Emma Brunskill