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Reinforcement learning (RL) has become an increasingly active area of research in recent years. Although there are many algorithms that allow an agent to solve tasks efficiently, they often ignore the possibility that prior experience…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-01-07 Francisco M. Garcia , Chris Nota , Philip S. Thomas

In standard reinforcement learning (RL), a learning agent seeks to optimize the overall reward. However, many key aspects of a desired behavior are more naturally expressed as constraints. For instance, the designer may want to limit the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-29 Sobhan Miryoosefi , Kianté Brantley , Hal Daumé , Miroslav Dudik , Robert Schapire

Deep reinforcement learning has enabled robots to learn motor skills from environmental interactions with minimal to no prior knowledge. However, existing reinforcement learning algorithms assume an episodic setting, in which the agent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-27 Jigang Kim , J. hyeon Park , Daesol Cho , H. Jin Kim

One of the key challenges to deep reinforcement learning (deep RL) is to ensure safety at both training and testing phases. In this work, we propose a novel technique of unsupervised action planning to improve the safety of on-policy…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-09-30 Hao-Lun Hsu , Qiuhua Huang , Sehoon Ha

Reinforcement learning systems have the potential to enable continuous improvement in unstructured environments, leveraging data collected autonomously. However, in practice these systems require significant amounts of instrumentation or…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-03-30 Abhishek Gupta , Corey Lynch , Brandon Kinman , Garrett Peake , Sergey Levine , Karol Hausman

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) trains a policy to maximize the task reward while satisfying safety constraints. While prior works focus on the performance optimality, we find that the optimal solutions of many safe RL problems are not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-03 Zuxin Liu , Zijian Guo , Zhepeng Cen , Huan Zhang , Jie Tan , Bo Li , Ding Zhao

There have been numerous advances in reinforcement learning, but the typically unconstrained exploration of the learning process prevents the adoption of these methods in many safety critical applications. Recent work in safe reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-02 David Isele , Alireza Nakhaei , Kikuo Fujimura

Recent advances in deep reinforcement learning have demonstrated the capability of learning complex control policies from many types of environments. When learning policies for safety-critical applications, it is essential to be sensitive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-12 Yichuan Charlie Tang , Jian Zhang , Ruslan Salakhutdinov

Safety in reinforcement learning (RL) is a key property in both training and execution in many domains such as autonomous driving or finance. In this paper, we formalize it with a constrained RL formulation in the distributional RL setting.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-01 Jianyi Zhang , Paul Weng

Autonomous agents trained via reinforcement learning present numerous safety concerns: reward hacking, negative side effects, and unsafe exploration, among others. In the context of near-future autonomous agents, operating in environments…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-02-20 Christopher Frye , Ilya Feige

Safe navigation is essential for autonomous systems operating in hazardous environments. Traditional planning methods excel at long-horizon tasks but rely on a predefined graph with fixed distance metrics. In contrast, safe Reinforcement…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-09-12 Meng Feng , Viraj Parimi , Brian Williams

Reinforcement learning offers the promise of automating the acquisition of complex behavioral skills. However, compared to commonly used and well-understood supervised learning methods, reinforcement learning algorithms can be brittle,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-01 Aviral Kumar , Xue Bin Peng , Sergey Levine

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

It is quite challenging to ensure the safety of reinforcement learning (RL) agents in an unknown and stochastic environment under hard constraints that require the system state not to reach certain specified unsafe regions. Many popular…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-06-14 Yixuan Wang , Simon Sinong Zhan , Ruochen Jiao , Zhilu Wang , Wanxin Jin , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang , Chao Huang , Qi Zhu

When deploying autonomous agents in unstructured environments over sustained periods of time, adaptability and robustness oftentimes outweigh optimality as a primary consideration. In other words, safety and survivability constraints play a…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-04-08 Motoya Ohnishi , Gennaro Notomista , Masashi Sugiyama , Magnus Egerstedt

Reinforcement learning has shown promise for automating power-grid operation tasks such as topology control and congestion management. However, its deployment in real-world power systems remains limited by strict safety requirements,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Gitesh Malik

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

A longstanding goal in safe reinforcement learning (RL) is a method to ensure the safety of a policy throughout the entire process, from learning to operation. However, existing safe RL paradigms inherently struggle to achieve this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Akifumi Wachi , Kohei Miyaguchi , Takumi Tanabe , Rei Sato , Youhei Akimoto

Reinforcement learning (RL) in the real world necessitates the development of procedures that enable agents to explore without causing harm to themselves or others. The most successful solutions to the problem of safe RL leverage offline…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-09 Alexander Quessy , Thomas Richardson , Sebastian East

Several works have addressed the problem of incorporating constraints in the reinforcement learning (RL) framework, however majority of them can only guarantee the satisfaction of soft constraints. In this work, we address the problem of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-16 Kwangyeon Kim , Akshita Gupta , Hong-Cheol Choi , Inseok Hwang