English
Related papers

Related papers: Provably Safe PAC-MDP Exploration Using Analogies

200 papers

Autonomous robots operating in unstructured, safety-critical environments, from planetary exploration to warehouses and homes, must learn to safely navigate and interact with their surroundings despite limited prior knowledge. Current…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Nikhil Uday Shinde , Dylan Hirsch , Michael C. Yip , Sylvia Herbert

We consider the problem of cooperative exploration where multiple robots need to cooperatively explore an unknown region as fast as possible. Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has recently become a trending paradigm for solving this…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-04-12 Chao Yu , Xinyi Yang , Jiaxuan Gao , Jiayu Chen , Yunfei Li , Jijia Liu , Yunfei Xiang , Ruixin Huang , Huazhong Yang , Yi Wu , Yu Wang

Suppose an agent is in a (possibly unknown) Markov Decision Process in the absence of a reward signal, what might we hope that an agent can efficiently learn to do? This work studies a broad class of objectives that are defined solely as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-29 Elad Hazan , Sham M. Kakade , Karan Singh , Abby Van Soest

Bayesian approaches developed to solve the optimal design of sequential experiments are mathematically elegant but computationally challenging. Recently, techniques using amortization have been proposed to make these Bayesian approaches…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-20 Tom Blau , Edwin V. Bonilla , Iadine Chades , Amir Dezfouli

A basic simulation-based reinforcement learning algorithm is the Monte Carlo Exploring States (MCES) method, also known as optimistic policy iteration, in which the value function is approximated by simulated returns and a greedy policy is…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-07-22 Jun Liu

Designing sample-efficient and computationally feasible reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms is particularly challenging in environments with large or infinite state and action spaces. In this paper, we advance this effort by presenting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-04 Zakaria Mhammedi

Deep reinforcement learning was instigated with the presence of trust region methods, being scalable and efficient. However, the pessimism of such algorithms, among which it forces to constrain in a trust region by all means, has been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-06 Jianfei Ma

Safety is still one of the major research challenges in reinforcement learning (RL). In this paper, we address the problem of how to avoid safety violations of RL agents during exploration in probabilistic and partially unknown…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-06 Martin Tappler , Stefan Pranger , Bettina Könighofer , Edi Muškardin , Roderick Bloem , Kim Larsen

The safety constraints commonly used by existing safe reinforcement learning (RL) methods are defined only on expectation of initial states, but allow each certain state to be unsafe, which is unsatisfying for real-world safety-critical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-15 Haitong Ma , Yang Guan , Shegnbo Eben Li , Xiangteng Zhang , Sifa Zheng , Jianyu Chen

In recent years, learning-based control in robotics has gained significant attention due to its capability to address complex tasks in real-world environments. With the advances in machine learning algorithms and computational capabilities,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-05-30 Taekyung Kim , Jungwi Mun , Junwon Seo , Beomsu Kim , Seongil Hong

This paper addresses the problem of learning optimal control policies for systems with uncertain dynamics and high-level control objectives specified as Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) formulas. Uncertainty is considered in the workspace…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-10-17 Yiannis Kantaros , Jun Wang

The ability to learn and execute optimal control policies safely is critical to realization of complex autonomy, especially where task restarts are not available and/or the systems are safety-critical. Safety requirements are often…

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

Autonomous exploration of obstacle-rich spaces requires strategies that ensure efficiency while guaranteeing safety against collisions with obstacles. This paper investigates a novel platform-agnostic reinforcement learning framework that…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-11-20 Gabriele Calzolari , Vidya Sumathy , Christoforos Kanellakis , George Nikolakopoulos

Small language models (SLMs) are increasingly deployed on edge devices, making their safety alignment crucial yet challenging. Current shallow alignment methods that rely on direct refusal of malicious queries fail to provide robust…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Haonan Shi , Guoli Wang , Tu Ouyang , An Wang

We present EigenSafe, an operator-theoretic framework for safety assessment of learning-enabled stochastic systems. In many robotic applications, the dynamics are inherently stochastic due to factors such as sensing noise and environmental…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Inkyu Jang , Jonghae Park , Sihyun Cho , Chams E. Mballo , Claire J. Tomlin , H. Jin Kim

Safe reinforcement learning has traditionally relied on predefined constraint functions to ensure safety in complex real-world tasks, such as autonomous driving. However, defining these functions accurately for varied tasks is a persistent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-31 Se-Wook Yoo , Seung-Woo Seo

Meta-Reinforcement Learning (Meta-RL) learns optimal policies across a series of related tasks. A central challenge in Meta-RL is rapidly identifying which previously learned task is most similar to a new one, in order to adapt to it…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Maxwell Joseph Jacobson , Rohan Menon , John Zeng , Yexiang Xue

Efficient exploration is a central problem in reinforcement learning and is often formalized as maximizing the entropy of the state-action occupancy measure. While unconstrained maximum-entropy exploration is relatively well understood,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-01 Florian Wolf , Ilyas Fatkhullin , Niao He

We study the problem of safe learning and exploration in sequential control problems. The goal is to safely collect data samples from operating in an environment, in order to learn to achieve a challenging control goal (e.g., an agile…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-30 Anqi Liu , Guanya Shi , Soon-Jo Chung , Anima Anandkumar , Yisong Yue

Achieving both optimality and safety under unknown system dynamics is a central challenge in real-world deployment of agents. To address this, we introduce a notion of maximum safe dynamics learning, where sufficient exploration is…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-02-24 Manish Prajapat , Johannes Köhler , Melanie N. Zeilinger , Andreas Krause