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Related papers: Safe Exploration by Solving Early Terminated MDP

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This paper addresses the problem of learning optimal control policies for systems with uncertain dynamics and high-level control objectives specified as Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) formulas. Uncertainty is considered in the workspace…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-10-17 Yiannis Kantaros , Jun Wang

Safe Reinforcement Learning (SafeRL) is the subfield of reinforcement learning that explicitly deals with safety constraints during the learning and deployment of agents. This survey provides a mathematically rigorous overview of SafeRL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-30 Ankita Kushwaha , Kiran Ravish , Preeti Lamba , Pawan Kumar

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

Most reinforcement learning (RL) approaches for the decision-making of autonomous driving consider safety as a reward instead of a cost, which makes it hard to balance the tradeoff between safety and other objectives. Human risk preference…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-03-05 Yang Li , Shijie Yuan , Yuan Chang , Xiaolong Chen , Qisong Yang , Zhiyuan Yang , Hongmao Qin

In this paper, we use concepts from supervisory control theory of discrete event systems to propose a method to learn optimal control policies for a finite-state Markov Decision Process (MDP) in which (only) certain sequences of actions are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-04 Arun Raman , Keerthan Shagrithaya , Shalabh Bhatnagar

Safe reinforcement learning is extremely challenging--not only must the agent explore an unknown environment, it must do so while ensuring no safety constraint violations. We formulate this safe reinforcement learning (RL) problem using the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-19 Archana Bura , Aria HasanzadeZonuzy , Dileep Kalathil , Srinivas Shakkottai , Jean-Francois Chamberland

Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents can solve diverse tasks but often exhibit unsafe behavior. Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs) address this by enforcing safety constraints, yet existing methods either sacrifice reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-18 Nikola Milosevic , Johannes Müller , Nico Scherf

Recent rapid developments in reinforcement learning algorithms have been giving us novel possibilities in many fields. However, due to their exploring property, we have to take the risk into consideration when we apply those algorithms to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-21 Yoshihiro Okawa , Tomotake Sasaki , Hitoshi Yanami , Toru Namerikawa

In real-life scenarios, a Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent aiming to maximise their reward, must often also behave in a safe manner, including at training time. Thus, much attention in recent years has been given to Safe RL, where an agent…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-03-26 Edwin Hamel-De le Court , Francesco Belardinelli , Alexander W. Goodall

We consider the reinforcement learning problem for the constrained Markov decision process (CMDP), which plays a central role in satisfying safety or resource constraints in sequential learning and decision-making. In this problem, we are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-19 Jiashuo Jiang , Yinyu Ye

Model-based Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a popular learning paradigm due to its potential sample efficiency compared to model-free RL. However, existing empirical model-based RL approaches lack the ability to explore. This work studies a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-16 Yuda Song , Wen Sun

Safe reinforcement learning tasks are a challenging domain despite being very common in the real world. The widely adopted CMDP model constrains the risks in expectation, which makes room for dangerous behaviors in long-tail states. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-30 Zihan Zhou , Jonathan Booher , Khashayar Rohanimanesh , Wei Liu , Aleksandr Petiushko , Animesh Garg

We present the problem of reinforcement learning with exogenous termination. We define the Termination Markov Decision Process (TerMDP), an extension of the MDP framework, in which episodes may be interrupted by an external non-Markovian…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-09 Guy Tennenholtz , Nadav Merlis , Lior Shani , Shie Mannor , Uri Shalit , Gal Chechik , Assaf Hallak , Gal Dalal

Exploration has been a crucial part of reinforcement learning, yet several important questions concerning exploration efficiency are still not answered satisfactorily by existing analytical frameworks. These questions include exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-12-06 Liangpeng Zhang , Ke Tang , Xin Yao

Humans achieve efficient learning by relying on prior knowledge about the structure of naturally occurring tasks. There is considerable interest in designing reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms with similar properties. This includes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-23 Jan Humplik , Alexandre Galashov , Leonard Hasenclever , Pedro A. Ortega , Yee Whye Teh , Nicolas Heess

We consider controller synthesis for stochastic and partially unknown environments in which safety is essential. Specifically, we abstract the problem as a Markov decision process in which the expected performance is measured using a cost…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2015-10-21 Sebastian Junges , Nils Jansen , Christian Dehnert , Ufuk Topcu , Joost-Pieter Katoen

Standard reinforcement learning (RL) agents never intelligently explore like a human (i.e. taking into account complex domain priors and adapting quickly based on previous exploration). Across episodes, RL agents struggle to perform even…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-06 Ben Norman , Jeff Clune

We consider discounted infinite-horizon constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs), where the goal is to find an optimal policy that maximizes the expected cumulative reward while satisfying expected cumulative constraints. Motivated by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Tingting Ni , Maryam Kamgarpour

We consider the problem of reinforcement learning under safety requirements, in which an agent is trained to complete a given task, typically formalized as the maximization of a reward signal over time, while concurrently avoiding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-25 Tu-Hoa Pham , Giovanni De Magistris , Don Joven Agravante , Subhajit Chaudhury , Asim Munawar , Ryuki Tachibana

The Exploration-Exploitation tradeoff arises in Reinforcement Learning when one cannot tell if a policy is optimal. Then, there is a constant need to explore new actions instead of exploiting past experience. In practice, it is common to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-10 Lior Shani , Yonathan Efroni , Shie Mannor