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Reinforcement learning is a powerful paradigm for learning optimal policies from experimental data. However, to find optimal policies, most reinforcement learning algorithms explore all possible actions, which may be harmful for real-world…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-11-15 Felix Berkenkamp , Matteo Turchetta , Angela P. Schoellig , Andreas Krause

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

One of the key challenges to deep reinforcement learning (deep RL) is to ensure safety at both training and testing phases. In this work, we propose a novel technique of unsupervised action planning to improve the safety of on-policy…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-09-30 Hao-Lun Hsu , Qiuhua Huang , Sehoon Ha

Safety is an essential component for deploying reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms in real-world scenarios, and is critical during the learning process itself. A natural first approach toward safe RL is to manually specify constraints on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-29 Krishnan Srinivasan , Benjamin Eysenbach , Sehoon Ha , Jie Tan , Chelsea Finn

Cost functions are commonly employed in Safe Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL). However, the cost is typically encoded as an indicator function due to the difficulty of quantifying the risk of policy decisions in the state space. Such an…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-02-21 Enrico Marchesini , Luca Marzari , Alessandro Farinelli , Christopher Amato

Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning (GCRL) provides a versatile framework for developing unified controllers capable of handling wide ranges of tasks, exploring environments, and adapting behaviors. However, its reliance on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-20 Charly Pecqueux-Guézénec , Stéphane Doncieux , Nicolas Perrin-Gilbert

As Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents are increasingly deployed in real-world applications, ensuring their behavior is transparent and trustworthy is paramount. A key component of trust is explainability, yet much of the work in Explainable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Clifford F , Devika Jay , Abhishek Sarkar , Satheesh K Perepu , Santhosh G S , Kaushik Dey , Balaraman Ravindran

The use of reinforcement learning (RL) in scientific applications, such as materials design and automated chemistry, is increasing. A major challenge, however, lies in fact that measuring the state of the system is often costly and time…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-08 Colin Bellinger , Andriy Drozdyuk , Mark Crowley , Isaac Tamblyn

Reinforcement learning has been successfully used to solve difficult tasks in complex unknown environments. However, these methods typically do not provide any safety guarantees during the learning process. This is particularly problematic,…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2019-07-02 Torsten Koller , Felix Berkenkamp , Matteo Turchetta , Joschka Boedecker , Andreas Krause

This paper proposes a safe data-driven control framework for nonlinear systems with partially known dynamics. The method ensures stability and constraint satisfaction during online learning, assuming only a stabilizable linear approximation…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-05-12 Stefano Tonini , Soroush Rastegarpour , Hamid Reza Feyzmahdavian , Nicola Bastianello , Karl Henrik Johansson

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms can achieve state-of-the-art performance in decision-making and continuous control tasks. However, applying RL algorithms on safety-critical systems still needs to be well justified due to the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-11-22 Mahmoud Selim , Amr Alanwar , M. Watheq El-Kharashi , Hazem M. Abbas , Karl H. Johansson

Active learning of physical systems must commonly respect practical safety constraints, which restricts the exploration of the design space. Gaussian Processes (GPs) and their calibrated uncertainty estimations are widely used for this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-16 Jörn Tebbe , Christoph Zimmer , Ansgar Steland , Markus Lange-Hegermann , Fabian Mies

A popular framework for enforcing safe actions in Reinforcement Learning (RL) is Constrained RL, where trajectory based constraints on expected cost (or other cost measures) are employed to enforce safety and more importantly these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-09 Huy Hoang , Tien Mai , Pradeep Varakantham

Safe exploration is a key to applying reinforcement learning (RL) in safety-critical systems. Existing safe exploration methods guaranteed safety under the assumption of regularity, and it has been difficult to apply them to large-scale…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-10 Akifumi Wachi , Yunyue Wei , Yanan Sui

Real-world applications require RL algorithms to act safely. During learning process, it is likely that the agent executes sub-optimal actions that may lead to unsafe/poor states of the system. Exploration is particularly brittle in…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-06-17 Elena Smirnova , Elvis Dohmatob , Jérémie Mary

Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown promise in addressing complex robotic challenges. In real-world applications, RL is often accompanied by failsafe controllers as a last resort to avoid catastrophic events. While necessary for…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-09-26 Jakob Thumm , Guillaume Pelat , Matthias Althoff

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) enables policy learning from static data but often suffers from poor coverage of the state-action space and distributional shift problems. This problem can be addressed by allowing limited online…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Soumyadeep Roy , Shashwat Kushwaha , Ambedkar Dukkipati

It is quite challenging to ensure the safety of reinforcement learning (RL) agents in an unknown and stochastic environment under hard constraints that require the system state not to reach certain specified unsafe regions. Many popular…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-06-14 Yixuan Wang , Simon Sinong Zhan , Ruochen Jiao , Zhilu Wang , Wanxin Jin , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang , Chao Huang , Qi Zhu

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) excels in various control tasks, yet the absence of safety guarantees hampers its real-world applicability. In particular, explorations during learning usually results in safety violations, while the RL…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Yifan Sun , Feihan Li , Weiye Zhao , Rui Chen , Tianhao Wei , Changliu Liu

In this paper, we develop a safe decision-making method for self-driving cars in a multi-lane, single-agent setting. The proposed approach utilizes deep reinforcement learning (RL) to achieve a high-level policy for safe tactical…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-05-17 Arash Mohammadhasani , Hamed Mehrivash , Alan Lynch , Zhan Shu