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This paper targets the efficient construction of a safety shield for decision making in scenarios that incorporate uncertainty. Markov decision processes (MDPs) are prominent models to capture such planning problems. Reinforcement learning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-11-26 Nils Jansen , Bettina Könighofer , Sebastian Junges , Alexandru C. Serban , Roderick Bloem

Reinforcement learning is structurally harder than supervised learning because the policy changes the data distribution it learns from. The resulting fragility is especially visible in large-model training, where the training and rollout…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Rasool Fakoor , Murdock Aubry , Nicholas Stranges , Alexander J. Smola

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

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

In reinforcement learning, robust policies for high-stakes decision-making problems with limited data are usually computed by optimizing the percentile criterion, which minimizes the probability of a catastrophic failure. Unfortunately,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-01 Elita A. Lobo , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Marek Petrik

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

Safe Reinforcement Learning (Safe RL) aims to ensure safety when an RL agent conducts learning by interacting with real-world environments where improper actions can induce high costs or lead to severe consequences. In this paper, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-06 Hanping Zhang , Yuhong Guo

Batch reinforcement learning (RL) defines the task of learning from a fixed batch of data lacking exhaustive exploration. Worst-case optimality algorithms, which calibrate a value-function model class from logged experience and perform some…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-10-03 Wenzhuo Zhou , Annie Qu

Bandit and reinforcement learning (RL) problems can often be framed as optimization problems where the goal is to maximize average performance while having access only to stochastic estimates of the true gradient. Traditionally, stochastic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-22 Wesley Chung , Valentin Thomas , Marlos C. Machado , Nicolas Le Roux

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) enables data-efficient and safe policy learning without online exploration, but its performance often degrades under distribution shift. The learned policy may visit out-of-distribution state-action pairs…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Hongqiang Lin , Zhenghui Fu , Weihao Tang , Pengfei Wang , Yiding Sun , Qixian Huang , Dongxu Zhang

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

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 (RL) aims at leveraging pre-collected data to find an optimal policy that maximizes the expected total rewards in a dynamic environment. The existing methods require absolutely continuous assumption (e.g., there…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-06-27 Xiaohong Chen , Zhengling Qi , Runzhe Wan

Robust reinforcement learning (RL) aims to find a policy that optimizes the worst-case performance in the face of uncertainties. In this paper, we focus on action robust RL with the probabilistic policy execution uncertainty, in which,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-21 Guanlin Liu , Zhihan Zhou , Han Liu , Lifeng Lai

Safe exploration remains a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), limiting the deployment of RL agents in the real world. We propose Sampling-Based Safe Reinforcement Learning (SBSRL), a model-based RL algorithm that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Luca Vignola , Bruce D. Lee , Manish Prajapat , Manuel Wendl , Melanie Zeilinger , Andreas Krause , Yarden As

Imitation of expert behaviour is a highly desirable and safe approach to the problem of sequential decision making. We provide an easy-to-implement, novel algorithm for imitation learning under a strict data paradigm, in which the agent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-07 Matthew Smith , Lucas Maystre , Zhenwen Dai , Kamil Ciosek

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

Automated vehicle control using reinforcement learning (RL) has attracted significant attention due to its potential to learn driving policies through environment interaction. However, RL agents often face training challenges in sample…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-09-08 Zhihao Zhang , Chengyang Peng , Ekim Yurtsever , Keith A. Redmill

The automatic synthesis of a policy through reinforcement learning (RL) from a given set of formal requirements depends on the construction of a reward signal and consists of the iterative application of many policy-improvement steps. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-21 Luigi Berducci , Radu Grosu

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