arXiv Machine Learning

Deep catastrophic-risk-aware reinforcement learning

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 3

Cantelli Constrained Policy Optimization

The paper introduces Canary, a risk‑averse reinforcement learning method that optimizes Value‑at‑Risk (VaR) constraints. By applying Cantelli’s inequality, Canary derives a tractable, conservative, and smooth bound on the VaR constraint using only the first two moments of the cost return, yielding a stable constraint estimator even with tight violation thresholds. Extending the trust‑region framework of Constrained Policy Optimization (CPO), the authors provide worst‑case bounds for policy improvement and constraint violation, and empirically demonstrate that Canary reliably satisfies the VaR constraint in every tested environment.

By Rohan Tangri, Jan-Peter Calliess
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 9

Credal Machine Learning for Risk-Averse Decision Making

The paper introduces a method for risk‑averse machine learning that uses credal sets—collections of probability distributions—to capture epistemic uncertainty about the true loss distribution. By producing predictions as credal sets and applying a novel decision rule that selects a single predictive distribution for conditional value‑at‑risk (CVaR) minimization, the approach aims to reliably avoid catastrophic decisions across classification, distribution shift, and reinforcement learning scenarios while maintaining near‑optimal expected performance.

By Timo L\"ohr, Paul Hofman, Maximilian Muschalik, Eyke H\"ullermeier
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 28

Arrive and Survive: Scaling Safe Goal-Conditioned Policy Learning from One-Bit Failure Signals

The paper introduces Safe Contrastive Reinforcement Learning (Safe-CRL), a method that corrects bias in contrastive RL caused by failure-terminated Markov decision processes. By applying mass-weighted InfoNCE and a log-survival-mass score, Safe-CRL uses only a one-bit failure signal to improve survival and goal-reaching performance across twelve robot navigation and locomotion tasks. The approach demonstrates complex failure-avoidance behaviors and completes the theoretical foundation of contrastive RL under failure termination.

By Guopeng Li, Yiyang Duan, Yiru Jiao, Chengcheng Xu