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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

This paper proposes a suite of rationality measures and associated theory for reinforcement learning agents, a property increasingly critical yet rarely explored. We define an action in deployment to be perfectly rational if it maximises…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Kejiang Qian , Amos Storkey , Fengxiang He

Standard reinforcement learning methods aim to master one way of solving a task whereas there may exist multiple near-optimal policies. Being able to identify this collection of near-optimal policies can allow a domain expert to efficiently…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-04 Muhammad A. Masood , Finale Doshi-Velez

Risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RL) aims to optimize policies that balance the expected reward and risk. In this paper, we present a novel risk-sensitive RL framework that employs an Iterated Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-05 Yu Chen , Yihan Du , Pihe Hu , Siwei Wang , Desheng Wu , Longbo Huang

The debate of what quantitative risk measure to choose in practice has mainly focused on the dichotomy between Value at Risk (VaR) -- a quantile -- and Expected Shortfall (ES) -- a tail expectation. Range Value at Risk (RVaR) is a natural…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-06-27 Tobias Fissler , Johanna F. Ziegel

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…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Xinyi Wang , Taekyung Kim , Bardh Hoxha , Georgios Fainekos , Dimitra Panagou

Many reinforcement learning algorithms, particularly those that rely on return estimates for policy improvement, can suffer from poor sample efficiency and training instability due to high-variance return estimates. In this paper we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-06 Alexander W. Goodall , Edwin Hamel-De le Court , Francesco Belardinelli

We propose VL Norm (Variance-reduced Length-dependent Normalization), a simple yet effective loss aggregation method tailored to the characteristic of dynamic generation lengths in Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR).…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Zhiyuan He , Xufang Luo , Yike Zhang , Yuqing Yang , Lili Qiu

This paper presents sensitivity analyses of resilience-based active distribution system planning solutions with respect to different parameters. The distribution system planning problem is formulated as a two-stage risk-averse stochastic…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-11-28 Abodh Poudyal , Anamika Dubey

Daily Value-at-Risk (VaR) for option books requires more than an accurate quantile forecast. It first requires a precise definition of the loss target. Before any model is evaluated, the protocol must fix the book construction rule, the…

Risk Management · Quantitative Finance 2026-05-19 Tenghan Zhong , Keyuan Wu

Online learning has traditionally focused on the expected rewards. In this paper, a risk-averse online learning problem under the performance measure of the mean-variance of the rewards is studied. Both the bandit and full information…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-03-15 Sattar Vakili , Alexis Boukouvalas , Qing Zhao

In this paper, we propose the multivariate range Value-at-Risk (MRVaR) and the multivariate range covariance (MRCov) as two risk measures and explore their desirable properties in risk management. In particular, we explain that such…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2023-05-17 Baishuai Zuo , Chuancun Yin , Jing Yao

Alignment of large language models (LLMs) typically involves training a reward model on preference data, followed by policy optimization with respect to the reward model. However, optimizing policies with respect to a single reward model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-23 Debangshu Banerjee , Kintan Saha , Aditya Gopalan

Learning to reach goal states and learning diverse skills through mutual information (MI) maximization have been proposed as principled frameworks for self-supervised reinforcement learning, allowing agents to acquire broadly applicable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-04 Jongwook Choi , Archit Sharma , Honglak Lee , Sergey Levine , Shixiang Shane Gu

Policy-gradient methods in Reinforcement Learning(RL) are very universal and widely applied in practice but their performance suffers from the high variance of the gradient estimate. Several procedures were proposed to reduce it including…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-16 Maxim Kaledin , Alexander Golubev , Denis Belomestny

We propose policy gradient algorithms for solving a risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RL) problem in on-policy as well as off-policy settings. We consider episodic Markov decision processes, and model the risk using the broad class of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-25 Nithia Vijayan , Prashanth L. A

We study dynamic pricing of a product with an unknown demand distribution over a finite horizon. Departing from the standard no-regret learning environment in which prices can be adjusted at any time, we restrict price changes to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-16 Parshan Pakiman , Boxiao Chen , Selvaprabu Nadarajah , Stefanus Jasin

Policy gradient methods, which have been extensively studied in the last decade, offer an effective and efficient framework for reinforcement learning problems. However, their performances can often be unsatisfactory, suffering from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Shihab Ahmed , El Houcine Bergou , Aritra Dutta , Yue Wang

The coefficient of variation (CV) is commonly used to measure relative dispersion. However, since it is based on the sample mean and standard deviation, outliers can adversely affect the CV. Additionally, for skewed distributions the mean…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-09-28 Chandima N. P. G. Arachchige , Luke A. Prendergast , Robert G. Staudte

Cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) is making rapid progress for solving tasks in a grid world and real-world scenarios, in which agents are given different attributes and goals, resulting in different behavior through the…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2022-07-13 Siyi Hu , Chuanlong Xie , Xiaodan Liang , Xiaojun Chang