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Related papers: Safe Distributional Reinforcement Learning

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Reinforcement learning (RL) has been successfully applied to a variety of robotics applications, where it outperforms classical methods. However, the safety aspect of RL and the transfer to the real world remain an open challenge. A…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-04-21 Murad Dawood , Ahmed Shokry , Maren Bennewitz

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

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

Real-world applications require RL algorithms to act safely. During learning process, it is likely that the agent executes sub-optimal actions that may lead to unsafe/poor states of the system. Exploration is particularly brittle in…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-06-17 Elena Smirnova , Elvis Dohmatob , Jérémie Mary

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has achieved tremendous success in many complex decision-making tasks. However, safety concerns are raised during deploying RL in real-world applications, leading to a growing demand for safe RL algorithms, such…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-05-28 Shangding Gu , Long Yang , Yali Du , Guang Chen , Florian Walter , Jun Wang , Alois Knoll

Reinforcement learning (RL)-based driver assistance systems seek to improve fuel consumption via continual improvement of powertrain control actions considering experiential data from the field. However, the need to explore diverse…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-01-04 Habtamu Hailemichael , Beshah Ayalew , Lindsey Kerbel , Andrej Ivanco , Keith Loiselle

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has recently received significant attention from the process systems engineering and control communities. Recent works have investigated the application of RL to identify optimal scheduling decision in the…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-03-11 Max Mowbray , Dongda Zhang , Ehecatl Antonio Del Rio Chanona

In this work, we address the problem of determining reliable policies in reinforcement learning (RL), with a focus on optimization under uncertainty and the need for performance guarantees. While classical RL algorithms aim at maximizing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Nadir Farhi

Reinforcement learning (RL) commonly relies on scalar rewards with limited ability to express temporal, conditional, or safety-critical goals, and can lead to reward hacking. Temporal logic expressible via the more general class of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-26 Dominik Wagner , Leon Witzman , Luke Ong

In dynamic programming (DP) and reinforcement learning (RL), an agent learns to act optimally in terms of expected long-term return by sequentially interacting with its environment modeled by a Markov decision process (MDP). More generally…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-03 Mastane Achab , Gergely Neu

Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms show amazing performance in recent years, but placing RL in real-world applications such as self-driven vehicles may suffer safety problems. A self-driven vehicle moving to a target position following…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-07-05 Huanhui Cao , Zhiyuan Cai , Hairuo Wei , Wenjie Lu , Lin Zhang , Hao Xiong

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is essentially a trial-and-error learning procedure which may cause unsafe behavior during the exploration-and-exploitation process. This hinders the application of RL to real-world control problems, especially…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-03 Yutong Li , Nan Li , H. Eric Tseng , Anouck Girard , Dimitar Filev , Ilya Kolmanovsky

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown remarkable success in solving relatively complex tasks, yet the deployment of RL systems in real-world scenarios poses significant challenges related to safety and robustness. This paper aims to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Taku Yamagata , Raul Santos-Rodriguez

We study the problem of Distributionally Robust Constrained RL (DRC-RL), where the goal is to maximize the expected reward subject to environmental distribution shifts and constraints. This setting captures situations where training and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-25 Zhengfei Zhang , Kishan Panaganti , Laixi Shi , Yanan Sui , Adam Wierman , Yisong Yue

Safe exploration remains a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), limiting the deployment of RL agents in the real world. We propose Sampling-Based Safe Reinforcement Learning (SBSRL), a model-based RL algorithm that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Luca Vignola , Bruce D. Lee , Manish Prajapat , Manuel Wendl , Melanie Zeilinger , Andreas Krause , Yarden As

Offline safe reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising approach for learning safe behaviors without engaging in risky online interactions with the environment. Most existing methods in offline safe RL rely on cost constraints…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-22 Ze Gong , Akshat Kumar , Pradeep Varakantham

Risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RL) aims to optimize policies that balance the expected reward and risk. In this paper, we present a novel risk-sensitive RL framework that employs an Iterated Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-05 Yu Chen , Yihan Du , Pihe Hu , Siwei Wang , Desheng Wu , Longbo Huang

Designing reliable decision strategies for autonomous urban driving is challenging. Reinforcement learning (RL) has been used to automatically derive suitable behavior in uncertain environments, but it does not provide any guarantee on the…

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

This paper proposes a safe reinforcement learning (RL) framework based on forward-invariance-induced action-space design. The control problem is cast as a Markov decision process, but instead of relying on runtime shielding or penalty-based…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-04-10 Chieh Tsai , Muhammad Junayed Hasan Zahed , Salim Hariri , Hossein Rastgoftar