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Deploying deep reinforcement learning in safety-critical settings requires developing algorithms that obey hard constraints during exploration. This paper contributes a first approach toward enforcing formal safety constraints on end-to-end…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-07-03 Nathan Hunt , Nathan Fulton , Sara Magliacane , Nghia Hoang , Subhro Das , Armando Solar-Lezama

As autonomous systems become more ubiquitous in daily life, ensuring high performance with guaranteed safety is crucial. However, safety and performance could be competing objectives, which makes their co-optimization difficult.…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Manan Tayal , Aditya Singh , Shishir Kolathaya , Somil Bansal

Reward functions are central in reinforcement learning (RL), guiding agents towards optimal decision-making. The complexity of RL tasks requires meticulously designed reward functions that effectively drive learning while avoiding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-31 Rati Devidze

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been shown to be effective in many scenarios. However, it typically requires the exploration of a sufficiently large number of state-action pairs, some of which may be unsafe. Consequently, its application to…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-06-24 Yousef Emam , Gennaro Notomista , Paul Glotfelter , Zsolt Kira , Magnus Egerstedt

This paper focuses on finding reinforcement learning policies for control systems with hard state and action constraints. Despite its success in many domains, reinforcement learning is challenging to apply to problems with hard constraints,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-24 Liyuan Zheng , Yuanyuan Shi , Lillian J. Ratliff , Baosen Zhang

This paper bridges some of the gap between optimal planning and reinforcement learning (RL), both of which share roots in dynamic programming applied to sequential decision making or optimal control. Whereas planning typically favors…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Filip V. Georgiev , Kalle G. Timperi , Başak Sakçak , Steven M. LaValle

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…

Despite the many recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL), the question of learning policies that robustly satisfy state constraints under unknown disturbances remains open. In this paper, we offer a new perspective on achieving…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Pierre-François Massiani , Alexander von Rohr , Lukas Haverbeck , Sebastian Trimpe

In this paper, we consider a multi-objective control problem for stochastic systems that seeks to minimize a cost of interest while ensuring safety. We introduce a novel measure of safety risk using the conditional value-at-risk and a set…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-02-23 Samantha Samuelson , Insoon Yang

In reinforcement learning, the goal is to seek rewards and avoid punishments. A simple scalar captures the value of a state or of taking an action, where expected future rewards increase and punishments decrease this quantity. Naturally an…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2015-02-19 Patrick C. Connor , Thomas P. Trappenberg

Reinforcement learning (RL) is attracting attention as an effective way to solve sequential optimization problems that involve high dimensional state/action space and stochastic uncertainties. Many such problems involve constraints…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-01 Haeun Yoo , Victor M. Zavala , Jay H. Lee

Ensuring the safety of Reinforcement Learning (RL) is crucial for its deployment in real-world applications. Nevertheless, managing the trade-off between reward and safety during exploration presents a significant challenge. Improving…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Shangding Gu , Bilgehan Sel , Yuhao Ding , Lu Wang , Qingwei Lin , Ming Jin , Alois Knoll

Safe reinforcement learning (Safe RL) refers to a class of techniques that aim to prevent RL algorithms from violating constraints in the process of decision-making and exploration during trial and error. In this paper, a novel model-free…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-08-14 Homayoun Honari , Mehran Ghafarian Tamizi , Homayoun Najjaran

Recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL) enable its use on increasingly complex tasks, but the lack of formal safety guarantees still limits its application in safety-critical settings. A common practical approach is to augment the RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Donggeon David Oh , Duy P. Nguyen , Haimin Hu , Jaime F. Fisac

Safety guarantee is essential in many engineering implementations. Reinforcement learning provides a useful way to strengthen safety. However, reinforcement learning algorithms cannot completely guarantee safety over realistic operations.…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-07-01 Hejun Huang , Zhenglong Li , Dongkun Han

In this paper, we consider the problem of learning safe policies for probabilistic-constrained reinforcement learning (RL). Specifically, a safe policy or controller is one that, with high probability, maintains the trajectory of the agent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-14 Weiqin Chen , Dharmashankar Subramanian , Santiago Paternain

We study the safe reinforcement learning problem with nonlinear function approximation, where policy optimization is formulated as a constrained optimization problem with both the objective and the constraint being nonconvex functions. For…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-29 Ming Yu , Zhuoran Yang , Mladen Kolar , Zhaoran Wang

Safety controllers is widely used to achieve safe reinforcement learning. Most methods that apply a safety controller are using handcrafted safety constraints to construct the safety controller. However, when the environment dynamics are…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-09-22 Haoyu Wang , Xin Yuan , Qinqing Ren

While reinforcement learning algorithms have had great success in the field of autonomous navigation, they cannot be straightforwardly applied to the real autonomous systems without considering the safety constraints. The later are crucial…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-07-28 Brian Angulo , Gregory Gorbov , Aleksandr Panov , Konstantin Yakovlev

Designing optimal reward functions has been desired but extremely difficult in reinforcement learning (RL). When it comes to modern complex tasks, sophisticated reward functions are widely used to simplify policy learning yet even a tiny…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-07 Ning Wei , Jiahua Liang , Di Xie , Shiliang Pu