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Related papers: Virtuously Safe Reinforcement Learning

200 papers

This paper proposes a safe reinforcement learning (RL) framework based on forward-invariance-induced action-space design. The control problem is cast as a Markov decision process, but instead of relying on runtime shielding or penalty-based…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-04-10 Chieh Tsai , Muhammad Junayed Hasan Zahed , Salim Hariri , Hossein Rastgoftar

Deep reinforcement learning agents have achieved state-of-the-art results by directly maximising cumulative reward. However, environments contain a much wider variety of possible training signals. In this paper, we introduce an agent that…

Autonomous cyber-physical agents and systems play an increasingly large role in our lives. To ensure that agents behave in ways aligned with the values of the societies in which they operate, we must develop techniques that allow these…

We revisit the role of instrumental value as a driver of adaptive behavior. In active inference, instrumental or extrinsic value is quantified by the information-theoretic surprisal of a set of observations measuring the extent to which…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2020-10-14 Alvaro Ovalle , Simon M. Lucas

In this paper we introduce a new unsupervised reinforcement learning method for discovering the set of intrinsic options available to an agent. This set is learned by maximizing the number of different states an agent can reliably reach, as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-11-23 Karol Gregor , Danilo Jimenez Rezende , Daan Wierstra

When function approximation is deployed in reinforcement learning (RL), the same problem may be formulated in different ways, often by treating a pre-processing step as a part of the environment or as part of the agent. As a consequence,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-02 Nan Jiang

Despite the many recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL), the question of learning policies that robustly satisfy state constraints under unknown disturbances remains open. In this paper, we offer a new perspective on achieving…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Pierre-François Massiani , Alexander von Rohr , Lukas Haverbeck , Sebastian Trimpe

To achieve scenario intelligence, humans must transfer knowledge to robots by developing goal-oriented algorithms, which are sometimes insensitive to dynamically changing environments. While deep reinforcement learning achieves significant…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-07-31 Tingguang Li , Jin Pan , Delong Zhu , Max Q. -H. Meng

Reinforcement learning algorithms, just like any other Machine learning algorithm pose a serious threat from adversaries. The adversaries can manipulate the learning algorithm resulting in non-optimal policies. In this paper, we analyze the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-12 Aqeel Anwar , Arijit Raychowdhury

Many sequential decision-making problems that are currently automated, such as those in manufacturing or recommender systems, operate in an environment where there is either little uncertainty, or zero risk of catastrophe. As companies and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-04 Marc Rigter

We present a reinforcement learning (RL) approach for robust optimisation of risk-aware performance criteria. To allow agents to express a wide variety of risk-reward profiles, we assess the value of a policy using rank dependent expected…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-16 Sebastian Jaimungal , Silvana Pesenti , Ye Sheng Wang , Hariom Tatsat

We introduce a two-player contest for evaluating the safety and robustness of machine learning systems, with a large prize pool. Unlike most prior work in ML robustness, which studies norm-constrained adversaries, we shift our focus to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-09-25 Tom B. Brown , Nicholas Carlini , Chiyuan Zhang , Catherine Olsson , Paul Christiano , Ian Goodfellow

We study the problem of designing autonomous agents that can learn to cooperate effectively with a potentially suboptimal partner while having no access to the joint reward function. This problem is modeled as a cooperative episodic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-14 Thomas Kleine Buening , Anne-Marie George , Christos Dimitrakakis

Imitation learning is an effective alternative approach to learn a policy when the reward function is sparse. In this paper, we consider a challenging setting where an agent and an expert use different actions from each other. We assume…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-27 Konrad Zolna , Negar Rostamzadeh , Yoshua Bengio , Sungjin Ahn , Pedro O. Pinheiro

Sequential decision making using Markov Decision Process underpins many realworld applications. Both model-based and model free methods have achieved strong results in these settings. However, real-world tasks must balance reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-01 Janaka Chathuranga Brahmanage , Akshat Kumar

Reinforcement learning has been established over the past decade as an effective tool to find optimal control policies for dynamical systems, with recent focus on approaches that guarantee safety during the learning and/or execution phases.…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-10-06 S M Nahid Mahmud , Scott A Nivison , Zachary I. Bell , Rushikesh Kamalapurkar

While reinforcement learning algorithms provide automated acquisition of optimal policies, practical application of such methods requires a number of design decisions, such as manually designing reward functions that not only define the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-29 Tim G. J. Rudner , Vitchyr H. Pong , Rowan McAllister , Yarin Gal , Sergey Levine

The deployment of autonomous robots in safety-critical applications requires safety guarantees. Provably safe reinforcement learning is an active field of research that aims to provide such guarantees using safeguards. These safeguards…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Tim Walter , Hannah Markgraf , Jonathan Külz , Matthias Althoff

Several works have addressed the problem of incorporating constraints in the reinforcement learning (RL) framework, however majority of them can only guarantee the satisfaction of soft constraints. In this work, we address the problem of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-16 Kwangyeon Kim , Akshita Gupta , Hong-Cheol Choi , Inseok Hwang

Reinforcement Learning faces an important challenge in partial observable environments that has long-term dependencies. In order to learn in an ambiguous environment, an agent has to keep previous perceptions in a memory. Earlier memory…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-22 Alper Demir