Related papers: Distributionally Robust Safety Verification of Neu…
Safe navigation for mobile robots demands policies that remain reliable under the high-consequence perception uncertainty of cluttered environments. Yet most existing safe reinforcement learning (RL) methods assess safety through average…
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…
Certifying the safety or robustness of neural networks against input uncertainties and adversarial attacks is an emerging challenge in the area of safe machine learning and control. To provide such a guarantee, one must be able to bound the…
Conditional value-at-risk (CVaR) and value-at-risk (VaR) are popular tail-risk measures in finance and insurance industries as well as in highly reliable, safety-critical uncertain environments where often the underlying probability…
In light of the inherently complex and dynamic nature of real-world environments, incorporating risk measures is crucial for the robustness evaluation of deep learning models. In this work, we propose a Risk-Averse Certification framework…
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…
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…
One of the main challenges in autonomous robotic exploration and navigation in unknown and unstructured environments is determining where the robot can or cannot safely move. A significant source of difficulty in this determination arises…
Extending Buehler et al.'s 2019 Deep Hedging paradigm, we innovatively employ deep neural networks to parameterize convex-risk minimization (CVaR/ES) for the portfolio tail-risk hedging problem. Through comprehensive numerical experiments…
Despite achieving excellent performance on benchmarks, deep neural networks often underperform in real-world deployment due to sensitivity to minor, often imperceptible shifts in input data, known as distributional shifts. These shifts are…
Safety in reinforcement learning (RL) is a key property in both training and execution in many domains such as autonomous driving or finance. In this paper, we formalize it with a constrained RL formulation in the distributional RL setting.…
Safe navigation is a fundamental challenge in multi-robot systems due to the uncertainty surrounding the future trajectory of the robots that act as obstacles for each other. In this work, we propose a principled data-driven approach where…
Deep Neural Network-based systems are now the state-of-the-art in many robotics tasks, but their application in safety-critical domains remains dangerous without formal guarantees on network robustness. Small perturbations to sensor inputs…
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…
Risk measures such as Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR) focus on extreme losses, where scarce tail data makes model error unavoidable. To hedge misspecification, one evaluates worst-case tail risk over an ambiguity set. Using Extreme Value…
In this paper, we study a novel episodic risk-sensitive Reinforcement Learning (RL) problem, named Iterated CVaR RL, which aims to maximize the tail of the reward-to-go at each step, and focuses on tightly controlling the risk of getting…
This paper proposes a novel safety specification tool, called the distributionally robust risk map (DR-risk map), for a mobile robot operating in a learning-enabled environment. Given the robot's position, the map aims to reliably assess…
Though deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has obtained substantial success, it may encounter catastrophic failures due to the intrinsic uncertainty of both transition and observation. Most of the existing methods for safe reinforcement…
Control Barrier functions (CBFs) have attracted extensive attention for designing safe controllers for their deployment in real-world safety-critical systems. However, the perception of the surrounding environment is often subject to…
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…