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Related papers: Safe Exploration in Markov Decision Processes

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In this paper, we present an online reinforcement learning algorithm for constrained Markov decision processes with a safety constraint. Despite the necessary attention of the scientific community, considering stochastic stopping time, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-26 Abhijit Mazumdar , Rafal Wisniewski , Manuela L. Bujorianu

Robotic exploration of unknown environments is fundamentally a problem of decision making under uncertainty where the robot must account for uncertainty in sensor measurements, localization, action execution, as well as many other factors.…

We provide a framework for speeding up algorithms for time-bounded reachability analysis of continuous-time Markov decision processes. The principle is to find a small, but almost equivalent subsystem of the original system and only analyse…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2018-07-26 Pranav Ashok , Yuliya Butkova , Holger Hermanns , Jan Křetínský

Decision-theoretic planning with risk-sensitive planning objectives is important for building autonomous agents or decision-support systems for real-world applications. However, this line of research has been largely ignored in the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2012-07-09 Yaxin Liu , Sven Koenig

We propose a solution to a time-varying variant of Markov Decision Processes which can be used to address decision-theoretic planning problems for autonomous systems operating in unstructured outdoor environments. We explore the time…

Robotics · Computer Science 2019-05-28 Junhong Xu , Kai Yin , Lantao Liu

Proximal policy optimization (PPO) algorithm is a deep reinforcement learning algorithm with outstanding performance, especially in continuous control tasks. But the performance of this method is still affected by its exploration ability.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-12 Junwei Zhang , Zhenghao Zhang , Shuai Han , Shuai Lü

Autonomous robots operating in unstructured, safety-critical environments, from planetary exploration to warehouses and homes, must learn to safely navigate and interact with their surroundings despite limited prior knowledge. Current…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Nikhil Uday Shinde , Dylan Hirsch , Michael C. Yip , Sylvia Herbert

Direct policy gradient methods for reinforcement learning are a successful approach for a variety of reasons: they are model free, they directly optimize the performance metric of interest, and they allow for richly parameterized policies.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-14 Alekh Agarwal , Mikael Henaff , Sham Kakade , Wen Sun

Controllable Markov chains describe the dynamics of sequential decision making tasks and are the central component in optimal control and reinforcement learning. In this work, we give the general form of an optimal policy for learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-24 Peter N. Loxley

Safe exploration is essential for the practical use of reinforcement learning (RL) in many real-world scenarios. In this paper, we present a generalized safe exploration (GSE) problem as a unified formulation of common safe exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-06 Akifumi Wachi , Wataru Hashimoto , Xun Shen , Kazumune Hashimoto

Exploration-exploitation of functions, that is learning and optimizing a mapping between inputs and expected outputs, is ubiquitous to many real world situations. These situations sometimes require us to avoid certain outcomes at all cost,…

Applications · Statistics 2016-05-17 Eric Schulz , Quentin J. M. Huys , Dominik R. Bach , Maarten Speekenbrink , Andreas Krause

This paper considers the problem of finding strategies that satisfy a mixture of sure and threshold objectives in Markov decision processes. We focus on a single $\omega$-regular objective expressed as parity that must be surely met while…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-08-05 Raphaël Berthon , Joost-Pieter Katoen , Tobias Winkler

Markov decision processes (MDPs) are the defacto frame-work for sequential decision making in the presence ofstochastic uncertainty. A classical optimization criterion forMDPs is to maximize the expected discounted-sum pay-off, which…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-02-28 Tomas Brazdil , Krishnendu Chatterjee , Petr Novotny , Jiri Vahala

Exploration of unknown, unstructured environments, such as in search and rescue, cave exploration, and planetary missions,presents significant challenges due to their unpredictable nature. This unpredictability can lead to inefficient path…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-10-08 Riana Gagnon Souleiman , Vivek Shankar Varadharajan , Giovanni Beltrame

Safe exploration presents a major challenge in reinforcement learning (RL): when active data collection requires deploying partially trained policies, we must ensure that these policies avoid catastrophically unsafe regions, while still…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-27 Homanga Bharadhwaj , Aviral Kumar , Nicholas Rhinehart , Sergey Levine , Florian Shkurti , Animesh Garg

Safe exploration is a key to applying reinforcement learning (RL) in safety-critical systems. Existing safe exploration methods guaranteed safety under the assumption of regularity, and it has been difficult to apply them to large-scale…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-10 Akifumi Wachi , Yunyue Wei , Yanan Sui

Policy optimization algorithms are crucial in many fields but challenging to grasp and implement, often due to complex calculations related to Markov decision processes and varying use of discount and average reward setups. This paper…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-04-07 Shuang Wu

This paper investigates conservative exploration in reinforcement learning where the performance of the learning agent is guaranteed to be above a certain threshold throughout the learning process. It focuses on the tabular episodic Markov…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-14 Donghao Li , Ruiquan Huang , Cong Shen , Jing Yang

We study optimality for the safety-constrained Markov decision process which is the underlying framework for safe reinforcement learning. Specifically, we consider a constrained Markov decision process (with finite states and finite…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-07-13 Rahul Misra , Rafał Wisniewski , Carsten Skovmose Kallesøe

As drones and autonomous cars become more widespread it is becoming increasingly important that robots can operate safely under realistic conditions. The noisy information fed into real systems means that robots must use estimates of the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2017-06-01 Brian Axelrod , Leslie Pack Kaelbling , Tomás Lozano-Pérez