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Many sequential decision problems involve finding a policy that maximizes total reward while obeying safety constraints. Although much recent research has focused on the development of safe reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-20 Nolan Wagener , Byron Boots , Ching-An Cheng

Batch reinforcement learning enables policy learning without direct interaction with the environment during training, relying exclusively on previously collected sets of interactions. This approach is, therefore, well-suited for high-risk…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-18 Amna Najib , Stefan Depeweg , Phillip Swazinna

In safety-critical domains, reinforcement learning (RL) agents must often satisfy strict, zero-cost safety constraints while accomplishing tasks. Existing model-free methods frequently either fail to achieve near-zero safety violations or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Dominik Wagner , Ankit Kanwar , Luke Ong

Safety is the priority concern when applying reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms to real-world control problems. While policy iteration provides a fundamental algorithm for standard RL, an analogous theoretical algorithm for safe RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-14 Yujie Yang , Zhilong Zheng , Shengbo Eben Li , Wei Xu , Jingjing Liu , Xianyuan Zhan , Ya-Qin Zhang

The Particle Swarm Optimization Policy (PSO-P) has been recently introduced and proven to produce remarkable results on interacting with academic reinforcement learning benchmarks in an off-policy, batch-based setting. To further…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-01-26 Daniel Hein , Steffen Udluft , Michel Tokic , Alexander Hentschel , Thomas A. Runkler , Volkmar Sterzing

Most theoretically motivated work in the offline reinforcement learning setting requires precise uncertainty estimates. This requirement restricts the algorithms derived in that work to the tabular and linear settings where such estimates…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-03 David Brandfonbrener , Remi Tachet des Combes , Romain Laroche

Safe reinforcement learning (SafeRL) is a prominent paradigm for autonomous driving, where agents are required to optimize performance under strict safety requirements. This dual objective creates a fundamental tension, as overly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-24 Mahesh Keswani , Raunak Bhattacharyya

In-context reinforcement learning (ICRL) promises fast adaptation to unseen environments without parameter updates, but current methods either cannot improve beyond the training distribution or require near-optimal data, limiting practical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-07 Anaïs Berkes , Vincent Taboga , Donna Vakalis , David Rolnick , Yoshua Bengio

Reinforcement learning in discrete combinatorial action spaces requires searching over exponentially many joint actions to simultaneously select multiple sub-actions that form coherent combinations. Existing approaches either simplify…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Matthew Landers , Taylor W. Killian , Thomas Hartvigsen , Afsaneh Doryab

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

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) is a standard paradigm for safety-critical decision making. However, real-world safety constraints can be complex, subjective, and even hard to explicitly specify. Existing works on constraint inference rely…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Chenglin Li , Grant Ruan , Hua Geng

Safety has become one of the main challenges of applying deep reinforcement learning to real world systems. Currently, the incorporation of external knowledge such as human oversight is the only means to prevent the agent from visiting the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-11-17 Yunkun Xu , Zhenyu Liu , Guifang Duan , Jiangcheng Zhu , Xiaolong Bai , Jianrong Tan

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

Batch reinforcement learning (RL) is important to apply RL algorithms to many high stakes tasks. Doing batch RL in a way that yields a reliable new policy in large domains is challenging: a new decision policy may visit states and actions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-23 Yao Liu , Adith Swaminathan , Alekh Agarwal , Emma Brunskill

Safe Reinforcement learning (Safe RL) aims at learning optimal policies while staying safe. A popular solution to Safe RL is shielding, which uses a logical safety specification to prevent an RL agent from taking unsafe actions. However,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-03-07 Wen-Chi Yang , Giuseppe Marra , Gavin Rens , Luc De Raedt

Offline Safe Reinforcement Learning (RL) seeks to address safety constraints by learning from static datasets and restricting exploration. However, these approaches heavily rely on the dataset and struggle to generalize to unseen scenarios…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Chenyang Cao , Yucheng Xin , Silang Wu , Longxiang He , Zichen Yan , Junbo Tan , Xueqian Wang

We consider the problem of reinforcement learning when provided with (1) a baseline control policy and (2) a set of constraints that the learner must satisfy. The baseline policy can arise from demonstration data or a teacher agent and may…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-13 Tsung-Yen Yang , Justinian Rosca , Karthik Narasimhan , Peter J. Ramadge

The recent success of reinforcement learning's (RL) in solving complex tasks is most often attributed to its capacity to explore and exploit an environment where it has been trained. Sample efficiency is usually not an issue since cheap…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-03-16 Govardana Sachithanandam Ramachandran , Kazuma Hashimoto , Caiming Xiong

Learning a risk-aware policy is essential but rather challenging in unstructured robotic tasks. Safe reinforcement learning methods open up new possibilities to tackle this problem. However, the conservative policy updates make it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-15 Linrui Zhang , Zichen Yan , Li Shen , Shoujie Li , Xueqian Wang , Dacheng Tao

Data preparation is a foundational yet notoriously challenging component of the machine learning lifecycle, characterized by a vast combinatorial search space. While reinforcement learning (RL) offers a promising direction, state-of-the-art…

Databases · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Jing Chang , Chang Liu , Jinbin Huang , Shuyuan Zheng , Rui Mao , Jianbin Qin