{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/catastrophic-risk-aware-reinforcement","title":"Catastrophic-risk-aware reinforcement learning with extreme-value-theory-based policy gradients","arxiv_id":"2406.15612","date":"2024-06-21","proceeding":null,"authors":["Parisa Davar","Frédéric Godin","Jose Garrido"],"abstract":"This paper tackles the problem of mitigating catastrophic risk (which is risk with very low frequency but very high severity) in the context of a sequential decision making process. This problem is particularly challenging due to the scarcity of observations in the far tail of the distribution of cumulative costs (negative rewards). A policy gradient algorithm is developed, that we call POTPG. It is based on approximations of the tail risk derived from extreme value theory. Numerical experiments highlight the out-performance of our method over common benchmarks, relying on the empirical distribution. An application to financial risk management, more precisely to the dynamic hedging of a financial option, is presented.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.15612v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2406.15612v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"catastrophic-risk-aware-reinforcement","repo_url":"https://github.com/parisadavar/EVT-policy-gradient-RL","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"decision-making","task_name":"Decision Making"},{"task_slug":"management","task_name":"Management"},{"task_slug":"sequential-decision-making","task_name":"Sequential Decision Making"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}