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

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The dynamic nature of driving environments and the presence of diverse road users pose significant challenges for decision-making in autonomous driving. Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has emerged as a popular approach to tackle this…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Iman Sharifi , Mustafa Yildirim , Saber Fallah

Designing hierarchical reinforcement learning algorithms that exhibit safe behaviour is not only vital for practical applications but also, facilitates a better understanding of an agent's decisions. We tackle this problem in the options…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-07-01 Arushi Jain , Khimya Khetarpal , Doina Precup

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) trains a constraint satisfaction policy by interacting with the environment. We aim to tackle a more challenging problem: learning a safe policy from an offline dataset. We study the offline safe RL problem…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-22 Zuxin Liu , Zijian Guo , Yihang Yao , Zhepeng Cen , Wenhao Yu , Tingnan Zhang , Ding Zhao

We address the problem of deploying a reinforcement learning (RL) agent on a physical system such as a datacenter cooling unit or robot, where critical constraints must never be violated. We show how to exploit the typically smooth dynamics…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-01-29 Gal Dalal , Krishnamurthy Dvijotham , Matej Vecerik , Todd Hester , Cosmin Paduraru , Yuval Tassa

Model-based reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising tool for developing controllers for real world systems (e.g., robotics, autonomous driving, etc.). However, real systems often have constraints imposed on their state space…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-22 Akshita Gupta , Inseok Hwang

For safely applying reinforcement learning algorithms on high-dimensional nonlinear dynamical systems, a simplified system model is used to formulate a safe reinforcement learning framework. Based on the simplified system model, a…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-09-09 Zhehua Zhou , Ozgur S. Oguz , Marion Leibold , Martin Buss

Navigating urban environments represents a complex task for automated vehicles. They must reach their goal safely and efficiently while considering a multitude of traffic participants. We propose a modular decision making algorithm to…

Robotics · Computer Science 2019-04-26 Maxime Bouton , Alireza Nakhaei , Kikuo Fujimura , Mykel J. Kochenderfer

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a foundational approach for enabling intelligent robotic behavior in dynamic and uncertain environments. This work presents an in-depth review of RL principles, advanced deep reinforcement learning…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Kumater Ter , Abolanle Adetifa , Daniel Udekwe

We address the problem of safely learning controlled stochastic dynamics from discrete-time trajectory observations, ensuring system trajectories remain within predefined safe regions during both training and deployment. Safety-critical…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-03 Luc Brogat-Motte , Alessandro Rudi , Riccardo Bonalli

In many real-world reinforcement learning (RL) problems, besides optimizing the main objective function, an agent must concurrently avoid violating a number of constraints. In particular, besides optimizing performance it is crucial to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-05-22 Yinlam Chow , Ofir Nachum , Edgar Duenez-Guzman , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh

Reinforcement Learning (RL), one of the core paradigms in machine learning, learns to make decisions based on real-world experiences. This approach has significantly advanced AI applications across various domains, notably in smart grid…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-02-27 Zheyu Zhang

We develop provably safe and convergent reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms for control of nonlinear dynamical systems, bridging the gap between the hard safety guarantees of control theory and the convergence guarantees of RL theory.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-08 Wesley A. Suttle , Vipul K. Sharma , Krishna C. Kosaraju , S. Sivaranjani , Ji Liu , Vijay Gupta , Brian M. Sadler

Care-giving and assistive robotics, driven by advancements in AI, offer promising solutions to meet the growing demand for care, particularly in the context of increasing numbers of individuals requiring assistance. This creates a pressing…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-05-14 Andrii Tytarenko

Due to limited resources and public safety concerns, deep reinforcement learning (RL) agents for many cyber-physical systems (e.g., autonomous vehicles) are first trained in simulators. However, when deployed in real world environments,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Gengyue Han , Yiheng Feng

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a promising approach for achieving autonomous driving due to robust decision-making capabilities. RL learns a driving policy through trial and error in traffic scenarios, guided by a reward function that…

Safe learning and optimization deals with learning and optimization problems that avoid, as much as possible, the evaluation of non-safe input points, which are solutions, policies, or strategies that cause an irrecoverable loss (e.g.,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-25 Youngmin Kim , Richard Allmendinger , Manuel López-Ibáñez

Reliable and stable locomotion has been one of the most fundamental challenges for legged robots. Deep reinforcement learning (deep RL) has emerged as a promising method for developing such control policies autonomously. In this paper, we…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-11-04 Sehoon Ha , Peng Xu , Zhenyu Tan , Sergey Levine , Jie Tan

Before deploying autonomous agents in the real world, we need to be confident they will perform safely in novel situations. Ideally, we would expose agents to a very wide range of situations during training, allowing them to learn about…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-03 Zachary Kenton , Angelos Filos , Owain Evans , Yarin Gal

Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods have been proven successful in solving manipulation tasks autonomously. However, RL is still not widely adopted on real robotic systems because working with real hardware entails additional challenges,…

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