English
Related papers

Related papers: Risk-Averse Learning with Varying Risk Levels

200 papers

In safety-critical applications of reinforcement learning such as healthcare and robotics, it is often desirable to optimize risk-sensitive objectives that account for tail outcomes rather than expected reward. We prove the first regret…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-12 O. Bastani , Y. J. Ma , E. Shen , W. Xu

The use of Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents in practical applications requires the consideration of suboptimal outcomes, depending on the familiarity of the agent with its environment. This is especially important in safety-critical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-07 Frederik Schubert , Theresa Eimer , Bodo Rosenhahn , Marius Lindauer

Enforcing safety in the presence of stochastic uncertainty is a challenging problem. Traditionally, researchers have proposed safety in the statistical mean as a safety measure in this case. However, ensuring safety in the statistical mean…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-03-09 Mohamadreza Ahmadi , Xiaobin Xiong , Aaron D. Ames

In order to model risk aversion in reinforcement learning, an emerging line of research adapts familiar algorithms to optimize coherent risk functionals, a class that includes conditional value-at-risk (CVaR). Because optimizing the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-09 Audrey Huang , Liu Leqi , Zachary C. Lipton , Kamyar Azizzadenesheli

We consider a liquidation problem in which a risk-averse trader tries to liquidate a fixed quantity of an asset in the presence of market impact and random price fluctuations. The trader encounters a trade-off between the transaction costs…

Trading and Market Microstructure · Quantitative Finance 2022-01-31 Seungki Min , Ciamac C. Moallemi , Costis Maglaras

In domains such as finance, healthcare, and robotics, managing worst-case scenarios is critical, as failure to do so can lead to catastrophic outcomes. Distributional Reinforcement Learning (DRL) provides a natural framework to incorporate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Mehrdad Moghimi , Hyejin Ku

This paper tackles the risk averse multi-armed bandits problem when incurred losses are non-stationary. The conditional value-at-risk (CVaR) is used as the objective function. Two estimation methods are proposed for this objective function…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-30 Leo Benac , Frédéric Godin

The fairness-aware online learning framework has arisen as a powerful tool for the continual lifelong learning setting. The goal for the learner is to sequentially learn new tasks where they come one after another over time and the learner…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-27 Chen Zhao , Feng Mi , Xintao Wu , Kai Jiang , Latifur Khan , Feng Chen

We develop a risk-averse safety analysis method for stochastic systems on discrete infinite time horizons. Our method quantifies the notion of risk for a control system in terms of the severity of a harmful random outcome in a fraction of…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-03-14 Chuanning Wei , Michael Fauss , Margaret P. Chapman

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

We consider continuous-time stochastic optimal control problems featuring Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR) in the objective. The major difficulty in these problems arises from time-inconsistency, which prevents us from directly using…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-05-27 Christopher W. Miller , Insoon Yang

In this paper, we study risk-sensitive Reinforcement Learning (RL), focusing on the objective of Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR) with risk tolerance $\tau$. Starting with multi-arm bandits (MABs), we show the minimax CVaR regret rate is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-26 Kaiwen Wang , Nathan Kallus , Wen Sun

We study learning algorithms that seek to minimize the conditional value-at-risk (CVaR), when all the learner knows is that the losses incurred may be heavy-tailed. We begin by studying a general-purpose estimator of CVaR for potentially…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-06-04 Matthew J. Holland , El Mehdi Haress

The development of Distributional Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has introduced a natural way to incorporate risk sensitivity into value-based and actor-critic methods by employing risk measures other than expectation in the value function.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Mehrdad Moghimi , Hyejin Ku

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…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Qisong He , Xinmiao Huang , Jinwei Hu , Zhuoyun Li , Yi Dong , Changshun Wu , Xiaowei Huang

In a wide variety of sequential decision making problems, it can be important to estimate the impact of rare events in order to minimize risk exposure. A popular risk measure is the conditional value-at-risk (CVaR), which is commonly…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-12-11 Dylan Troop , Frédéric Godin , Jia Yuan Yu

The popular systemic risk measure CoVaR (conditional Value-at-Risk) and its variants are widely used in economics and finance. In this article, we propose joint dynamic forecasting models for the Value-at-Risk (VaR) and CoVaR. The CoVaR…

Econometrics · Economics 2025-01-22 Timo Dimitriadis , Yannick Hoga

Ensuring safety in autonomous driving requires precise, real-time risk assessment and adaptive behavior. Prior work on risk estimation either outputs coarse, global scene-level metrics lacking interpretability, proposes indicators without…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-08-06 Boyang Tian , Weisong Shi

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

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