[2607.11607] Auditing the Risk Claims of Distributional Reinforcement Learning

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arXiv:2607.11607 (cs)

[Submitted on 13 Jul 2026]

Title:Auditing the Risk Claims of Distributional Reinforcement Learning

Authors:Hari Prasad<br>View a PDF of the paper titled Auditing the Risk Claims of Distributional Reinforcement Learning, by Hari Prasad

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Abstract:Distributional reinforcement learning agents learn full return distributions that are increasingly read at face value: for interpretability, risk-sensitive control, and safety monitoring. We ask a question theory anticipates but that has not been measured directly: are the risk claims of a trained distributional agent true? Our audit combines a decision-relevant screening metric (the excess Wasserstein gap between the top two actions, which equals the mass by which first-order stochastic dominance is violated), ground truth from snapshot-restart Monte Carlo, and a statistical harness (permutation nulls, bootstrap refutation, FDR control) without which the audit itself manufactures false conclusions. Across QR-DQN, C51, and IQN on MinAtar (33 runs), 40-95% of the strongest claimed risk trade-offs are refuted at 95% confidence, the placement of the strongest claims is statistically indistinguishable from truth-blind, and essentially no claim is confirmable: for these agents, the learned "risk" reflects a training artifact rather than environment stochasticity. The artifact is structural (fully formed early in training, uncorrelated with final score, idiosyncratic to each seed) and appears unchanged at full-Atari scale, with every top Breakout claim of a pretrained near-state-of-the-art QR-DQN refuted. Positive controls of known magnitude confirm 96-100% of real claims (correlation 0.89-0.92): the reading measures the agents, not the audit. Acting on the heads' CVaR advice at their most-flagged states ranges from beneficial to significantly worse than chance. Neither training for risk nor ensembling removes the artifact, and recalibration passes the audit only by nullifying the claims: the head is uninformative, not merely miscalibrated. We release the toolkit and document two silent pitfalls that produced convincing but wrong audits of our own.

Comments:<br>25 pages, 8 figures, 3 tables (main text); includes supplementary material

Subjects:

Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Machine Learning (cs.LG); Machine Learning (stat.ML)

ACM classes:<br>I.2.6; G.3

Cite as:<br>arXiv:2607.11607 [cs.AI]

(or<br>arXiv:2607.11607v1 [cs.AI] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.11607

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arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

Submission history<br>From: Hari Prasad [view email]<br>[v1]<br>Mon, 13 Jul 2026 14:30:01 UTC (1,894 KB)

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