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Related papers: Learning to be Safe: Deep RL with a Safety Critic

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Collision avoidance is key for mobile robots and agents to operate safely in the real world. In this work we present SAFER, an efficient and effective collision avoidance system that is able to improve safety by correcting the control…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-06-30 Mario Srouji , Hugues Thomas , Hubert Tsai , Ali Farhadi , Jian Zhang

Vanilla Reinforcement Learning (RL) can efficiently solve complex tasks but does not provide any guarantees on system behavior. To bridge this gap, we propose a three-step safe RL procedure for continuous action spaces that provides…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-09-29 Hanna Krasowski , Prithvi Akella , Aaron D. Ames , Matthias Althoff

Reinforcement learning provides an appealing framework for robotic control due to its ability to learn expressive policies purely through real-world interaction. However, this requires addressing real-world constraints and avoiding…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-05-09 Kyle Stachowicz , Sergey Levine

Despite remarkable achievements in artificial intelligence, the deployability of learning-enabled systems in high-stakes real-world environments still faces persistent challenges. For example, in safety-critical domains like autonomous…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-12-19 Minjae Cho , Chuangchuang Sun

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

As safety violations can lead to severe consequences in real-world robotic applications, the increasing deployment of Reinforcement Learning (RL) in robotic domains has propelled the study of safe exploration for reinforcement learning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-09-21 Hanping Zhang , Yuhong Guo

Despite recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL), its application in safety critical domains like autonomous vehicles is still challenging. Although punishing RL agents for risky situations can help to learn safe policies, it may also…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-07-16 Danial Kamran , Tizian Engelgeh , Marvin Busch , Johannes Fischer , Christoph Stiller

Safely exploring an unknown dynamical system is critical to the deployment of reinforcement learning (RL) in physical systems where failures may have catastrophic consequences. In scenarios where one knows little about the dynamics, diverse…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-12-01 Tyler Lu , Martin Zinkevich , Craig Boutilier , Binz Roy , Dale Schuurmans

The ability to recover from an unexpected external perturbation is a fundamental motor skill in bipedal locomotion. An effective response includes the ability to not just recover balance and maintain stability but also to fall in a safe…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-01-06 Visak Kumar

Ensuring safety during reinforcement learning (RL) training is critical in real-world applications where unsafe exploration can lead to devastating outcomes. While most safe RL methods mitigate risk through constraints or penalization, they…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-29 Yeeun Lim , Narim Jeong , Donghwan Lee

The rapid advancement of machine learning (ML) has led to its increasing integration into cyber-physical systems (CPS) across diverse domains. While CPS offer powerful capabilities, incorporating ML components introduces significant safety…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-15 Calum Corrie Imrie , Ioannis Stefanakos , Sepeedeh Shahbeigi , Richard Hawkins , Simon Burton

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) agents accomplish given tasks while adhering to specific constraints. Employing constraints expressed via easily-understandable human language offers considerable potential for real-world applications due to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-16 Xingzhou Lou , Junge Zhang , Ziyan Wang , Kaiqi Huang , Yali Du

For the task with complicated manipulation in unstructured environments, traditional hand-coded methods are ineffective, while reinforcement learning can provide more general and useful policy. Although the reinforcement learning is able to…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-12-03 Nan Lin , Linrui Zhang , Yuxuan Chen , Zhenrui Chen , Yujun Zhu , Ruoxi Chen , Peichen Wu , Xiaoping Chen

Recent progress in AI and Reinforcement learning has shown great success in solving complex problems with high dimensional state spaces. However, most of these successes have been primarily in simulated environments where failure is of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-03-25 Bharat Prakash , Mohit Khatwani , Nicholas Waytowich , Tinoosh Mohsenin

Contact-rich tasks pose significant challenges for robotic systems due to inherent uncertainty, complex dynamics, and the high risk of damage during interaction. Recent advances in learning-based control have shown great potential in…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Heng Zhang , Rui Dai , Gokhan Solak , Pokuang Zhou , Yu She , Arash Ajoudani

Safe exploration presents a major challenge in reinforcement learning (RL): when active data collection requires deploying partially trained policies, we must ensure that these policies avoid catastrophically unsafe regions, while still…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-27 Homanga Bharadhwaj , Aviral Kumar , Nicholas Rhinehart , Sergey Levine , Florian Shkurti , Animesh Garg

Reinforcement learning (RL) methods for social robot navigation show great success navigating robots through large crowds of people, but the performance of these learning-based methods tends to degrade in particularly challenging or…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-08-14 Sara Pohland , Alvin Tan , Prabal Dutta , Claire Tomlin

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

Reinforcement learning (RL) agents with pre-specified reward functions cannot provide guaranteed safety across variety of circumstances that an uncertain system might encounter. To guarantee performance while assuring satisfaction of safety…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-04-20 Aquib Mustafa , Majid Mazouchi , Subramanya Nageshrao , Hamidreza Modares

For all its successes, Reinforcement Learning (RL) still struggles to deliver formal guarantees on the closed-loop behavior of the learned policy. Among other things, guaranteeing the safety of RL with respect to safety-critical systems is…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-04-03 Sebastien Gros , Mario Zanon , Alberto Bemporad