Conformal Risk Certificates for Portfolio Optimization Under Uncertainty: A Gated Reinforcement-Learning Approach

Mohammad Zarei, Amirhossein MohammadpourAzari, Moslem Habibi

Reinforcement-learning portfolio policies can optimize allocations from prices, covariances, and prior positions, yet they lack a calibrated, replayable mechanism for certifying that a proposed allocation respects a bounded risk envelope before execution. Regulators increasingly expect automated portfolio systems to provide exactly this kind of pre-trade audit trail, interpretable risk limit, and human-oversight mechanism. Gated Conformal Semantic Risk Control addresses this gap by separating return-seeking allocation from text-conditioned downside-risk verification. An instruction-tuned language model maps timestamped disclosures into schema-validated semantic risk states over macro, liquidity, earnings, and sector channels. These states induce correlated ellipsoidal factor-shock uncertainty sets whose conformal radii are calibrated by rolling finite-sample prediction over localized semantic nonconformity buckets. An asymmetric second-order cone gate then checks each raw PPO proposal against a certified worst-case semantic loss budget. The gate stays inactive for compliant proposals and intervenes only when that budget is exceeded. In walk-forward out-of-sample tests on nine…