English
Related papers

Related papers: Return Capping: Sample-Efficient CVaR Policy Gradi…

200 papers

We show how to reduce the problem of computing VaR and CVaR with Student T return distributions to evaluation of analytical functions of the moments. This allows an analysis of the risk properties of systems to be carefully attributed…

Portfolio Management · Quantitative Finance 2011-03-01 William T. Shaw

We propose an iterative gradient-based algorithm to efficiently solve the portfolio selection problem with multiple spectral risk constraints. Since the conditional value at risk (CVaR) is a special case of the spectral risk measure, our…

Portfolio Management · Quantitative Finance 2015-03-26 Carlos Abad , Garud Iyengar

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-06 Hua Zheng , Wei Xie , M. Ben Feng , Keilung Choy

The Stochastic Shortest Path (SSP) problem models probabilistic sequential-decision problems where an agent must pursue a goal while minimizing a cost function. Because of the probabilistic dynamics, it is desired to have a cost function…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-03-02 Willy Arthur Silva Reis , Denis Benevolo Pais , Valdinei Freire , Karina Valdivia Delgado

In this work, we tackle the problem of minimising the Conditional-Value-at-Risk (CVaR) of output quantities of complex differential models with random input data, using gradient-based approaches in combination with the Multi-Level Monte…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2023-10-16 Sundar Ganesh , Fabio Nobile

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn policies that satisfy certain constraints before deploying them to safety-critical applications. Previous primal-dual style approaches suffer from instability issues and lack optimality…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-20 Zuxin Liu , Zhepeng Cen , Vladislav Isenbaev , Wei Liu , Zhiwei Steven Wu , Bo Li , Ding Zhao

Data in the real-world classification problems are always imbalanced or long-tailed, wherein the majority classes have the most of the samples that dominate the model training. In such setting, the naive model tends to have poor performance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-30 Hong Zhu , Runpeng Yu , Xing Tang , Yifei Wang , Yuan Fang , Yisen Wang

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…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-06-22 Margaret P. Chapman , Michael Fauss , Kevin M. Smith

Many continuous control tasks have bounded action spaces. When policy gradient methods are applied to such tasks, out-of-bound actions need to be clipped before execution, while policies are usually optimized as if the actions are not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-06-25 Yasuhiro Fujita , Shin-ichi Maeda

This paper studies the optimization of Markov decision processes (MDPs) from a risk-seeking perspective, where the risk is measured by conditional value-at-risk (CVaR). The objective is to find a policy that maximizes the long-run CVaR of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-12-05 Li Xia , Zhihui Yu , Peter W. Glynn

The policy gradient approach is a flexible and powerful reinforcement learning method particularly for problems with continuous actions such as robot control. A common challenge in this scenario is how to reduce the variance of policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-01-18 Tingting Zhao , Hirotaka Hachiya , Voot Tangkaratt , Jun Morimoto , Masashi Sugiyama

We study risk-sensitive Reinforcement Learning (RL), where we aim to maximize the Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR) with a fixed risk tolerance $\tau$. Prior theoretical work studying risk-sensitive RL focuses on the tabular Markov Decision…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-21 Yulai Zhao , Wenhao Zhan , Xiaoyan Hu , Ho-fung Leung , Farzan Farnia , Wen Sun , Jason D. Lee

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-27 Prashanth L. A. , Krishna Jagannathan , Ravi Kumar Kolla

We introduce the Value-at-Risk Constrained Policy Optimization algorithm (VaR-CPO), a sample efficient and conservative method designed to optimize Value-at-Risk (VaR) constrained reinforcement learning (RL) problems. Empirically, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-01 Rohan Tangri , Jan-Peter Calliess

We propose a method for finding approximate compilations of quantum unitary transformations, based on techniques from policy gradient reinforcement learning. The choice of a stochastic policy allows us to rephrase the optimization problem…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2022-09-14 David A. Herrera-Martí

In this work, we study the sample complexity problem of risk-sensitive Reinforcement Learning (RL) with a generative model, where we aim to maximize the Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR) with risk tolerance level $\tau$ at each step, a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-25 Zilong Deng , Simon Khan , Shaofeng Zou

Current methods for end-to-end constructive neural combinatorial optimization usually train a policy using behavior cloning from expert solutions or policy gradient methods from reinforcement learning. While behavior cloning is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Jonathan Pirnay , Dominik G. Grimm

Offline policy improvement faces an inherent conflict between maximizing value and fitting the data distribution. While in-sample weighted regression is stable, it suffers from over-conservatism that suppresses high-value actions in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Jiaxin Zhao , Weihang Pan , Xun Liang , Binbin Lin

We consider a class of risk-averse submodular maximization problems (RASM) where the objective is the conditional value-at-risk (CVaR) of a random nondecreasing submodular function at a given risk level. We propose valid inequalities and an…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-04-17 Hao-Hsiang Wu , Simge Kucukyavuz

Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR) is a widely used risk-sensitive objective for learning under rare but high-impact losses, yet its statistical behavior under heavy-tailed data remains poorly understood. Unlike expectation-based risk, CVaR…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-23 Dinesh Karthik Mulumudi , Piyushi Manupriya , Gholamali Aminian , Anant Raj