arXiv AI
Jul 17
Decision Making Needs Uncertainty Quantification [Lecture Notes]
arXiv:2607. 14407v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Many signal processing systems ultimately exist to {act}.
Quantifying Risk Under Evolving Uncertainty: Belief-Dependent Robustness for Safe Sequential Decision Making
The paper introduces RATTL (Risk-Adversarial Total-Reward Learning), a framework that adjusts an agent’s caution based on epistemic uncertainty by using a Bayesian posterior over dynamics and a Wasserstein ambiguity set whose radius depends on that posterior. As evidence accumulates, the radius shrinks, smoothly transitioning the agent’s behavior from worst-case robustness to risk-neutral reward maximization. The authors prove a Safety Sandwich theorem showing RATTL’s value lies between the uninformed robust value and the full-knowledge optimum, and demonstrate the method on a binary-hazard example where the criterion reduces to Conditional Value-at-Risk.
Related stories
arXiv AI
Aug 20
Robust Risk Under Evolving Uncertainty: A Wasserstein Counterpart of the Entropic Value-at-Risk
The paper introduces the Wasserstein entropic value-at-risk, a coherent risk measure that replaces the relative-entropy ball of the traditional entropic value-at-risk with an optimal-transport ball. This new measure captures reachable catastrophes that the original entropic measure ignores, and its variational dual mirrors the entropic formula with a transport price replacing inverse temperature. By driving the transport radius with belief entropy, the authors derive a closed‑form robust dynamic‑programming operator whose cautiousness decreases as belief sharpens, providing a certified safety sandwich and a sharp safety switch.
arXiv AI
Jun 10
SHAPO: Sharpness-Aware Policy Optimization for Safe Exploration
arXiv:2606. 10228v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Safe exploration is a prerequisite for deploying reinforcement learning (RL) agents in safety-critical domains.
arXiv AI
Jun 30
What Capable Agents Must Know: Selection Theorems for Robust Decision-Making under Uncertainty
arXiv:2603. 02491v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: As artificial agents become increasingly capable, what internal structure is necessary for an agent to act competently under uncertainty?
arXiv Machine Learning
2d ago
Robust Risk-Sensitive Reinforcement Learning from Corrupted Human Feedback
arXiv:2609.38938v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) learns from human comparisons, which can be corrupted or deliberately manipulated. This paper studies...
arXiv AI
Jun 4
Scenario Generation for Risk-Aware Reinforcement Learning with Probably Approximately Safe Guarantees
arXiv:2606. 04812v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Guaranteeing safety is critical to the deployment of reinforcement learning (RL) agents in the real-world, especially as policies learned using deep RL may demonstrate susceptibility to transition perturbations that result in unknown or unsafe behaviour.
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 5
Robust General Utility for Reinforcement Learning
arXiv:2608. 03562v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) with general utility extends classic RL by optimizing an arbitrary utility functional of the policy-induced occupancy measure, thereby enabling a broader range of applications.
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 5
Conformal Risk-Averse Decision Making with Action Conditional Guarantee
arXiv:2606. 05551v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reliable decision making pipelines powered by machine learning models require uncertainty quantification (UQ) methods that come with explicit safety guarantees.
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 22
Reinforcement Learning under State and Outcome Uncertainty: A Foundational Distributional Perspective
arXiv:2609.24103v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In many real-world planning tasks, agents must tackle uncertainty about the environment's state and variability in the outcomes of any chosen policy. W...
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 21
Reinforcement Learning under State and Outcome Uncertainty: A Foundational Distributional Perspective
In many real-world planning tasks, agents must tackle uncertainty about the environment's state and variability in the outcomes of any chosen policy. We address both forms of uncertainty as a first st...
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 30
Constrained Policy Optimization with Cantelli-Bounded Value-at-Risk
arXiv:2601. 22993v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce Canary, a risk-averse method designed to optimize Value-at-Risk (VaR) constrained reinforcement learning (RL) problems.
arXiv AI
Jul 14
Efficient Q-Learning and Actor-Critic Methods for Robust Average-Reward Reinforcement Learning
arXiv:2506. 07040v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study model-free methods for distributionally robust infinite-horizon average-reward Markov decision processes (MDPs).