Related papers: Measures of Variability for Risk-averse Policy Gra…
Reinforcement learning (RL) methods for social robot navigation show great success navigating robots through large crowds of people, but the performance of these learning-based methods tends to degrade in particularly challenging or…
Gradient-based meta-learners such as Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML) have shown strong few-shot performance in supervised and reinforcement learning settings. However, specifically in the case of meta-reinforcement learning (meta-RL),…
Multimodal learning often encounters the under-optimized problem and may perform worse than unimodal learning. Existing approaches attribute this issue to imbalanced learning across modalities and tend to address it through gradient…
In several real-world applications involving decision making under uncertainty, the traditional expected value objective may not be suitable, as it may be necessary to control losses in the case of a rare but extreme event. Conditional…
Effective reinforcement learning (RL) for complex stochastic systems requires leveraging historical data collected in previous iterations to accelerate policy optimization. Classical experience replay treats all past observations uniformly…
Model uncertainty has been one prominent issue both in the theory of risk measures and in practice such as financial risk management and regulation. Motivated by this observation, in this paper, we take a new perspective to describe the…
This paper considers the problem of learning a model in model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL). We examine how the planning module of an MBRL algorithm uses the model, and propose that the model learning module should incorporate the way…
Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has achieved impressive performance in robotics and autonomous systems (RAS). A key challenge to its deployment in real-life operations is the presence of spuriously unsafe DRL policies. Unexplored states…
A common challenge in reinforcement learning is how to convert the agent's interactions with an environment into fast and robust learning. For instance, earlier work makes use of domain knowledge to improve existing reinforcement learning…
Uncertainty quantification is vital for decision-making and risk assessment in machine learning. Mean-variance regression models, which predict both a mean and residual noise for each data point, provide a simple approach to uncertainty…
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…
We propose and analyze algorithms for distributionally robust optimization of convex losses with conditional value at risk (CVaR) and $\chi^2$ divergence uncertainty sets. We prove that our algorithms require a number of gradient…
Appropriate risk management is crucial to ensure the competitiveness of financial institutions and the stability of the economy. One widely used financial risk measure is Value-at-Risk (VaR). VaR estimates based on linear and parametric…
Online interactions with the environment to collect data samples for training a Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent is not always feasible due to economic and safety concerns. The goal of Offline Reinforcement Learning is to address this…
Invariance learning methods aim to learn invariant features in the hope that they generalize under distributional shifts. Although many tasks are naturally characterized by continuous domains, current invariance learning techniques…
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…
Residual Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a popular approach for adapting pretrained policies by learning a lightweight residual policy that provides corrective actions. While Residual RL is more sample-efficient than finetuning the entire…
Two key tasks in high-dimensional regularized regression are tuning the regularization strength for accurate predictions and estimating the out-of-sample risk. It is known that the standard approach -- $k$-fold cross-validation -- is…
Existing reinforcement learning (RL)-based post-training methods for large language models have advanced rapidly, yet their design has largely been guided by heuristics rather than systematic theoretical principles. This gap limits our…
Safe reinforcement learning (RL) seeks to mitigate unsafe behaviors that arise from exploration during training by reducing constraint violations while maintaining task performance. Existing approaches typically rely on a single policy to…