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In safety-critical applications, autonomous agents may need to learn in an environment where mistakes can be very costly. In such settings, the agent needs to behave safely not only after but also while learning. To achieve this, existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-22 Matteo Turchetta , Andrey Kolobov , Shital Shah , Andreas Krause , Alekh Agarwal

Reinforcement learning (RL) systems typically optimize scalar reward functions that assume precise and reliable evaluation of outcomes. However, real-world objectives--especially those derived from human preferences--are often uncertain,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-30 Disha Singha

Designing hierarchical reinforcement learning algorithms that exhibit safe behaviour is not only vital for practical applications but also, facilitates a better understanding of an agent's decisions. We tackle this problem in the options…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-07-01 Arushi Jain , Khimya Khetarpal , Doina Precup

Methods that extract policy primitives from offline demonstrations using deep generative models have shown promise at accelerating reinforcement learning(RL) for new tasks. Intuitively, these methods should also help to trainsafeRLagents…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-04 Dylan Slack , Yinlam Chow , Bo Dai , Nevan Wichers

In this paper, we confront the problem of applying reinforcement learning to agents that perceive the environment through many sensors and that can perform parallel actions using many actuators as is the case in complex autonomous robots.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2011-07-04 E. Celaya , J. M. Porta

This paper addresses the problem of maintaining safety during training in Reinforcement Learning (RL), such that the safety constraint violations are bounded at any point during learning. In a variety of RL applications the safety of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-19 Rohan Mitta , Hosein Hasanbeig , Jun Wang , Daniel Kroening , Yiannis Kantaros , Alessandro Abate

Real-world reinforcement learning applications are often hindered by delayed feedback from environments, which violates the Markov assumption and introduces significant challenges. Although numerous delay-compensating methods have been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Jongsoo Lee , Jangwon Kim , Jiseok Jeong , Soohee Han

This paper presents the concept of an adaptive safe padding that forces Reinforcement Learning (RL) to synthesise optimal control policies while ensuring safety during the learning process. Policies are synthesised to satisfy a goal,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-24 Mohammadhosein Hasanbeig , Alessandro Abate , Daniel Kroening

Reinforcement learning (RL) is ubiquitous in the development of modern AI systems. However, state-of-the-art RL agents require extensive, and potentially unsafe, interactions with their environments to learn effectively. These limitations…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-01 Yarden As , Bhavya Sukhija , Lenart Treven , Carmelo Sferrazza , Stelian Coros , Andreas Krause

Ensuring the safe exploration of reinforcement learning (RL) agents is critical for deployment in real-world systems. Yet existing approaches struggle to strike the right balance: methods that tightly enforce safety often cripple task…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-19 Daniel Bethell , Simos Gerasimou , Radu Calinescu , Calum Imrie

Reinforcement learning agents learn by encouraging behaviours which maximize their total reward, usually provided by the environment. In many environments, however, the reward is provided after a series of actions rather than each single…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-01-04 Mohammad Reza Bonyadi , Rui Wang , Maryam Ziaei

Reinforcement learning has been shown to perform a range of complex tasks through interaction with an environment or collected leveraging experience. However, many of these approaches presume optimal or near optimal experiences or the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-21 Chapman Siu , Jason Traish , Richard Yi Da Xu

Deep Reinforcement Learning (or just "RL") is gaining popularity for industrial and research applications. However, it still suffers from some key limits slowing down its widespread adoption. Its performance is sensitive to initial…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-31 Pierrick Pochelu , Serge G. Petiton , Bruno Conche

Reinforcement learning (RL) has recently been used for solving challenging decision-making problems in the context of automated driving. However, one of the main drawbacks of the presented RL-based policies is the lack of safety guarantees,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-07-16 Danial Kamran , Yu Ren , Martin Lauer

Lifelong reinforcement learning provides a promising framework for developing versatile agents that can accumulate knowledge over a lifetime of experience and rapidly learn new tasks by building upon prior knowledge. However, current…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-05-22 Haitham Bou Ammar , Rasul Tutunov , Eric Eaton

Decision Transformer-based decision-making agents have shown the ability to generalize across multiple tasks. However, their performance relies on massive data and computation. We argue that this inefficiency stems from the forgetting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-30 Jikun Kang , Romain Laroche , Xingdi Yuan , Adam Trischler , Xue Liu , Jie Fu

We address the problem of deploying a reinforcement learning (RL) agent on a physical system such as a datacenter cooling unit or robot, where critical constraints must never be violated. We show how to exploit the typically smooth dynamics…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-01-29 Gal Dalal , Krishnamurthy Dvijotham , Matej Vecerik , Todd Hester , Cosmin Paduraru , Yuval Tassa

Reinforcement learning (RL) agents improve through trial-and-error, but when reward is sparse and the agent cannot discover successful action sequences, learning stagnates. This has been a notable problem in training deep RL agents to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-02-27 Evan Zheran Liu , Kelvin Guu , Panupong Pasupat , Tianlin Shi , Percy Liang

Reinforcement learning (RL) in the real world necessitates the development of procedures that enable agents to explore without causing harm to themselves or others. The most successful solutions to the problem of safe RL leverage offline…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-09 Alexander Quessy , Thomas Richardson , Sebastian East

Autonomous vehicles with a self-evolving ability are expected to cope with unknown scenarios in the real-world environment. Take advantage of trial and error mechanism, reinforcement learning is able to self evolve by learning the optimal…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-08-23 Shuo Yang , Liwen Wang , Yanjun Huang , Hong Chen