Papers › Towards Safe Reinforcement Learning via Constraining Conditional Value at Risk

Towards Safe Reinforcement Learning via Constraining Conditional Value at Risk

18 Jun 2021ICML Workshop AML 2021 7archive 2025-07-28

Chengyang Ying, Xinning Zhou, Dong Yan, Jun Zhu

Though deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has obtained substantial success, it may encounter catastrophic failures due to the intrinsic uncertainty caused by stochastic policies and environment variability. To address this issue, we propose a novel reinforcement learning framework of CVaR-Proximal-Policy-Optimization (CPPO) by rating the conditional value-at-risk (CVaR) as an assessment for risk. We show that performance degradation under observation state disturbance and transition probability disturbance theoretically depends on the range of disturbance as well as the gap of value function between different states. Therefore, constraining the value function among states with CVaR can improve the robustness of the policy. Experimental results show that CPPO achieves higher cumulative reward and exhibits stronger robustness against observation state disturbance and transition probability disturbance in environment dynamics among a series of continuous control tasks in MuJoCo.

PaperPDFCode

Code

yingchengyang/CPPO officialpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Continuous ControlDeep Reinforcement LearningMuJoCoReinforcement LearningReinforcement Learning (RL)Safe Reinforcement Learningcontinuous-controlreinforcement-learning

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections