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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

Real-world reinforcement learning (RL) problems often demand that agents behave safely by obeying a set of designed constraints. We address the challenge of safe RL by coupling a safety guide based on model predictive control (MPC) with a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-30 Samuel Pfrommer , Tanmay Gautam , Alec Zhou , Somayeh Sojoudi

It is doubtful that animals have perfect inverse models of their limbs (e.g., what muscle contraction must be applied to every joint to reach a particular location in space). However, in robot control, moving an arm's end-effector to a…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-09-19 Justus Huebotter , Serge Thill , Marcel van Gerven , Pablo Lanillos

Existing approaches in reinforcement learning train an agent to learn desired optimal behavior in an environment with rule based surrounding agents. In safety critical applications such as autonomous driving it is crucial that the rule…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-08-22 Arjun Srinivasan , Anubhav Paras , Aniket Bera

Policy learning for partially observed control tasks requires policies that can remember salient information from past observations. In this paper, we present a method for learning policies with internal memory for high-dimensional,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-09-24 Marvin Zhang , Zoe McCarthy , Chelsea Finn , Sergey Levine , Pieter Abbeel

We present a methodology to deploy the stochastic policy gradient method, using actor-critic techniques, when the optimal policy is approximated using a parametric optimization problem, allowing one to enforce safety via hard constraints.…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-09-23 Sebastien Gros , Mario Zanon

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 consider an improper reinforcement learning setting where a learner is given $M$ base controllers for an unknown Markov decision process, and wishes to combine them optimally to produce a potentially new controller that can outperform…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-20 Mohammadi Zaki , Avinash Mohan , Aditya Gopalan , Shie Mannor

Humans are masters at quickly learning many complex tasks, relying on an approximate understanding of the dynamics of their environments. In much the same way, we would like our learning agents to quickly adapt to new tasks. In this paper,…

Deep neural networks have demonstrated their capability to learn control policies for a variety of tasks. However, these neural network-based policies have been shown to be susceptible to exploitation by adversarial agents. Therefore, there…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-12 Sampo Kuutti , Saber Fallah , Richard Bowden

Learning high-performance control policies that remain consistent with expert behavior is a fundamental challenge in robotics. Reinforcement learning can discover high-performing strategies but often departs from desirable human behavior,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-04-06 Siwei Ju , Jan Tauberschmidt , Oleg Arenz , Peter van Vliet , Jan Peters

Policy gradient methods hold great potential for solving complex continuous control tasks. Still, their training efficiency can be improved by exploiting structure within the optimization problem. Recent work indicates that supervised…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-19 Jan Schneider , Pierre Schumacher , Simon Guist , Le Chen , Daniel Häufle , Bernhard Schölkopf , Dieter Büchler

Reinforcement Learning (RL) can effectively learn complex policies. However, learning these policies often demands extensive trial-and-error interactions with the environment. In many real-world scenarios, this approach is not practical due…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-19 Linh Le Pham Van , Hung The Tran , Sunil Gupta

Reinforcement learning algorithms typically necessitate extensive exploration of the state space to find optimal policies. However, in safety-critical applications, the risks associated with such exploration can lead to catastrophic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-28 Kaustubh Mani , Vincent Mai , Charlie Gauthier , Annie Chen , Samer Nashed , Liam Paull

Safe reinforcement learning (Safe RL) aims to ensure policy performance while satisfying safety constraints. However, most existing Safe RL methods assume benign environments, making them vulnerable to adversarial perturbations commonly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-19 Jialiang Fan , Shixiong Jiang , Mengyu Liu , Fanxin Kong

The use of neural networks and reinforcement learning has become increasingly popular in autonomous vehicle control. However, the opaqueness of the resulting control policies presents a significant barrier to deploying neural network-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-18 Sampo Kuutti , Richard Bowden , Saber Fallah

We investigate the important problem of certifying stability of reinforcement learning policies when interconnected with nonlinear dynamical systems. We show that by regulating the input-output gradients of policies, strong guarantees of…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2018-10-30 Ming Jin , Javad Lavaei

Model predictive control (MPC) is an effective method for controlling robotic systems, particularly autonomous aerial vehicles such as quadcopters. However, application of MPC can be computationally demanding, and typically requires…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-02-17 Tianhao Zhang , Gregory Kahn , Sergey Levine , Pieter Abbeel

A reinforcement learning (RL) policy trained in a nominal environment could fail in a new/perturbed environment due to the existence of dynamic variations. Existing robust methods try to obtain a fixed policy for all envisioned dynamic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-10 Yikun Cheng , Pan Zhao , Manan Gandhi , Bo Li , Evangelos Theodorou , Naira Hovakimyan

In this work we propose an approach to learn a robust policy for solving the pivoting task. Recently, several model-free continuous control algorithms were shown to learn successful policies without prior knowledge of the dynamics of the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2017-03-03 Rika Antonova , Silvia Cruciani , Christian Smith , Danica Kragic