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This paper considers the problem of learning safe policies in the context of reinforcement learning (RL). In particular, we consider the notion of probabilistic safety. This is, we aim to design policies that maintain the state of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-20 Weiqin Chen , Dharmashankar Subramanian , Santiago Paternain

Reactive synthesis algorithms allow automatic construction of policies to control an environment modeled as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) that are optimal with respect to high-level temporal logic specifications. However, they assume that…

Formal Languages and Automata Theory · Computer Science 2022-05-31 Rajeev Alur , Suguman Bansal , Osbert Bastani , Kishor Jothimurugan

Distributional reinforcement learning (DRL) enhances the understanding of the effects of the randomness in the environment by letting agents learn the distribution of a random return, rather than its expected value as in standard RL. At the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-03-27 Zifan Wang , Yulong Gao , Siyi Wang , Michael M. Zavlanos , Alessandro Abate , Karl H. Johansson

Reinforcement learning (RL) methods usually treat reward functions as black boxes. As such, these methods must extensively interact with the environment in order to discover rewards and optimal policies. In most RL applications, however,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-19 Rodrigo Toro Icarte , Toryn Q. Klassen , Richard Valenzano , Sheila A. McIlraith

Improving sample efficiency is central to Reinforcement Learning (RL), especially in environments where the rewards are sparse. Some recent approaches have proposed to specify reward functions as manually designed or learned reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-26 Shuai Han , Mehdi Dastani , Shihan Wang

This paper targets the efficient construction of a safety shield for decision making in scenarios that incorporate uncertainty. Markov decision processes (MDPs) are prominent models to capture such planning problems. Reinforcement learning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-11-26 Nils Jansen , Bettina Könighofer , Sebastian Junges , Alexandru C. Serban , Roderick Bloem

We introduce a novel theoretical framework for Return On Investment (ROI) maximization in repeated decision-making. Our setting is motivated by the use case of companies that regularly receive proposals for technological innovations and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-24 Nicolò Cesa-Bianchi , Tommaso Cesari , Yishay Mansour , Vianney Perchet

Reinforcement learning (RL) methods often rely on massive exploration data to search optimal policies, and suffer from poor sampling efficiency. This paper presents a mixed reinforcement learning (mixed RL) algorithm by simultaneously using…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-03-03 Yao Mu , Shengbo Eben Li , Chang Liu , Qi Sun , Bingbing Nie , Bo Cheng , Baiyu Peng

Safe reinforcement learning (Safe RL) refers to a class of techniques that aim to prevent RL algorithms from violating constraints in the process of decision-making and exploration during trial and error. In this paper, a novel model-free…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-08-14 Homayoun Honari , Mehran Ghafarian Tamizi , Homayoun Najjaran

Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) agents typically learn world models by minimizing predictive loss. However, powerful RL optimizers inevitably exploit minor model inaccuracies, leading to simulator exploitation and a reality gap…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Christoph Dann , Yishay Mansour , Mehryar Mohri

Our goal is to build robust optimization problems for making decisions based on complex data from the past. In robust optimization (RO) generally, the goal is to create a policy for decision-making that is robust to our uncertainty about…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2014-07-07 Theja Tulabandhula , Cynthia Rudin

Offline safe reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising approach for learning safe behaviors without engaging in risky online interactions with the environment. Most existing methods in offline safe RL rely on cost constraints…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-22 Ze Gong , Akshat Kumar , Pradeep Varakantham

Recently, reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have demonstrated remarkable success in learning complicated behaviors from minimally processed input. However, most of this success is limited to simulation. While there are promising…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-29 Quan Vuong , Sharad Vikram , Hao Su , Sicun Gao , Henrik I. Christensen

A major challenge of reinforcement learning (RL) in real-world applications is the variation between environments, tasks or clients. Meta-RL (MRL) addresses this issue by learning a meta-policy that adapts to new tasks. Standard MRL methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-03 Ido Greenberg , Shie Mannor , Gal Chechik , Eli Meirom

In light of the burgeoning success of reinforcement learning (RL) in diverse real-world applications, considerable focus has been directed towards ensuring RL policies are robust to adversarial attacks during test time. Current approaches…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-21 Xiangyu Liu , Chenghao Deng , Yanchao Sun , Yongyuan Liang , Furong Huang

Reinforcement learning (RL) is concerned with how intelligence agents take actions in a given environment to maximize the cumulative reward they receive. In healthcare, applying RL algorithms could assist patients in improving their health…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-04-21 Chengchun Shi

Policy optimization is a core component of reinforcement learning (RL), and most existing RL methods directly optimize parameters of a policy based on maximizing the expected total reward, or its surrogate. Though often achieving…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-08-10 Ruiyi Zhang , Changyou Chen , Chunyuan Li , Lawrence Carin

This paper studies the continuous-time reinforcement learning (RL) for optimal switching problems across multiple regimes. We consider a type of exploratory formulation under entropy regularization where the agent randomizes both the timing…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-12-23 Yijie Huang , Mengge Li , Xiang Yu , Zhou Zhou

Reinforcement Learning (RL) policies are designed to predict actions based on current observations to maximize cumulative future rewards. In real-world applications (i.e., non-simulated environments), sensors are essential for measuring the…

Remote state estimation of large-scale distributed dynamic processes plays an important role in Industry 4.0 applications. In this paper, by leveraging the theoretical results of structural properties of optimal scheduling policies, we…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2024-10-28 Jiazheng Chen , Wanchun Liu , Daniel E. Quevedo , Yonghui Li , Branka Vucetic