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Related papers: Safety-Constrained Reinforcement Learning for MDPs

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This paper investigates the problem of designing control policies that satisfy high-level specifications described by signal temporal logic (STL) in unknown, stochastic environments. While many existing works concentrate on optimizing the…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-12-16 Siqi Wang , Shaoyuan Li , Li Yin , Xiang Yin

Probabilistic model checking aims to prove whether a Markov decision process (MDP) satisfies a temporal logic specification. The underlying methods rely on an often unrealistic assumption that the MDP is precisely known. Consequently,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-07-02 Murat Cubuktepe , Nils Jansen , Sebastian Junges , Joost-Pieter Katoen , Ufuk Topcu

Safety is a critical feature of controller design for physical systems. When designing control policies, several approaches to guarantee this aspect of autonomy have been proposed, such as robust controllers or control barrier functions.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-26 Miguel Calvo-Fullana , Luiz F. O. Chamon , Santiago Paternain

Humans achieve efficient learning by relying on prior knowledge about the structure of naturally occurring tasks. There is considerable interest in designing reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms with similar properties. This includes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-23 Jan Humplik , Alexandre Galashov , Leonard Hasenclever , Pedro A. Ortega , Yee Whye Teh , Nicolas Heess

This paper studies the approximation of optimal control policies by quantized (discretized) policies for a very general class of Markov decision processes (MDPs). The problem is motivated by applications in networked control systems,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2015-05-14 Naci Saldi , Serdar Yüksel , Tamás Linder

In this paper, we consider the problem of synthesizing a controller in the presence of uncertainty such that the resulting closed-loop system satisfies certain hard constraints while optimizing certain (soft) performance objectives. We…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-10-17 Navid Hashemi , Xin Qin , Jyotirmoy V. Deshmukh , Georgios Fainekos , Bardh Hoxha , Danil Prokhorov , Tomoya Yamaguchi

In this paper, we focus on the problem of robustifying reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms with respect to model uncertainties. Indeed, in the framework of model-based RL, we propose to merge the theory of constrained Markov decision…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-13 Reazul Hasan Russel , Mouhacine Benosman , Jeroen Van Baar

We present the first model-free Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithm to synthesise policies for an unknown Markov Decision Process (MDP), such that a linear time property is satisfied. The given temporal property is converted into a Limit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-19 Mohammadhosein Hasanbeig , Alessandro Abate , Daniel Kroening

Given a set of trajectories demonstrating the execution of a task safely in a constrained MDP with observable rewards but with unknown constraints and non-observable costs, we aim to find a policy that maximizes the likelihood of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-02 George Papadopoulos , George A. Vouros

Reinforcement learning has witnessed recent applications to a variety of tasks in quantum programming. The underlying assumption is that those tasks could be modeled as Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). Here, we investigate the feasibility…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2024-06-06 M. Sohaib Alam , Noah F. Berthusen , Peter P. Orth

Reinforcement learning (RL) is currently one of the most prominent methods for optimizing dynamical systems, with breakthrough results across various fields. The framework is based on the concept of a Markov decision process (MDP), leading…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-11-17 Rene Carmona , Mathieu Lauriere

In this paper, we consider the problem of learning safe policies for probabilistic-constrained reinforcement learning (RL). Specifically, a safe policy or controller is one that, with high probability, maintains the trajectory of the agent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-14 Weiqin Chen , Dharmashankar Subramanian , Santiago Paternain

We consider the stochastic shortest path planning problem in MDPs, i.e., the problem of designing policies that ensure reaching a goal state from a given initial state with minimum accrued cost. In order to account for rare but important…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-03-30 Mohamadreza Ahmadi , Anushri Dixit , Joel W. Burdick , Aaron D. Ames

Markov decision processes (MDPs) are used to model a wide variety of applications ranging from game playing over robotics to finance. Their optimal policy typically maximizes the expected sum of rewards given at each step of the decision…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-26 Maximilian Nägele , Jan Olle , Thomas Fösel , Remmy Zen , Florian Marquardt

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

We investigate the problem of designing optimal stealthy poisoning attacks on the control channel of Markov decision processes (MDPs). This research is motivated by the recent interest of the research community for adversarial and poisoning…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-09-16 Alessio Russo , Alexandre Proutiere

Safety and robustness are two desired properties for any reinforcement learning algorithm. CMDPs can handle additional safety constraints and RMDPs can perform well under model uncertainties. In this paper, we propose to unite these two…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-21 Reazul Hasan Russel , Mouhacine Benosman , Jeroen Van Baar , Radu Corcodel

While learning in an unknown Markov Decision Process (MDP), an agent should trade off exploration to discover new information about the MDP, and exploitation of the current knowledge to maximize the reward. Although the agent will…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-16 Evrard Garcelon , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Alessandro Lazaric , Matteo Pirotta

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn policies that satisfy certain constraints before deploying them to safety-critical applications. Previous primal-dual style approaches suffer from instability issues and lack optimality…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-20 Zuxin Liu , Zhepeng Cen , Vladislav Isenbaev , Wei Liu , Zhiwei Steven Wu , Bo Li , Ding Zhao

In this paper, we study safe data collection for the purpose of policy evaluation in tabular Markov decision processes (MDPs). In policy evaluation, we are given a \textit{target} policy and asked to estimate the expected cumulative reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-05 Subhojyoti Mukherjee , Josiah P. Hanna , Robert Nowak