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Related papers: Safe Exploration by Solving Early Terminated MDP

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Average-reward Markov decision processes (MDPs) provide a foundational framework for sequential decision-making under uncertainty. However, average-reward MDPs have remained largely unexplored in reinforcement learning (RL) settings, with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-29 Juan Sebastian Rojas , Chi-Guhn Lee

Multi-robot navigation and path planning in continuous state and action spaces with uncertain environments remains an open challenge. Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) is one of the most popular paradigms for solving this task, but its…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-08-21 Jahid Chowdhury Choton , John Woods , William Hsu

To achieve sample efficiency in reinforcement learning (RL), it necessitates efficiently exploring the underlying environment. Under the offline setting, addressing the exploration challenge lies in collecting an offline dataset with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-15 Shuang Qiu , Jieping Ye , Zhaoran Wang , Zhuoran Yang

Meta reinforcement learning (meta-RL) extracts knowledge from previous tasks and achieves fast adaptation to new tasks. Despite recent progress, efficient exploration in meta-RL remains a key challenge in sparse-reward tasks, as it requires…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-11-15 Jin Zhang , Jianhao Wang , Hao Hu , Tong Chen , Yingfeng Chen , Changjie Fan , Chongjie Zhang

Constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs) model scenarios of sequential decision making with multiple objectives that are increasingly important in many applications. However, the model is often unknown and must be learned online while…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-30 Krishna C Kalagarla , Rahul Jain , Pierluigi Nuzzo

We study continuous action reinforcement learning problems in which it is crucial that the agent interacts with the environment only through safe policies, i.e.,~policies that do not take the agent to undesirable situations. We formulate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-13 Yinlam Chow , Ofir Nachum , Aleksandra Faust , Edgar Duenez-Guzman , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh

State of the art methods for target tracking with sensor management (or controlled sensing) are model-based and are obtained through solutions to Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) formulations. In this paper a…

Signal Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-07-22 Adarsh M. Subramaniam , Argyrios Gerogiannis , James Z. Hare , Venugopal V. Veeravalli

This paper studies constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs) with constraints against stochastic thresholds, aiming at safety of reinforcement learning in unknown and uncertain environments. We leverage a Growing-Window estimator…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-25 Qian Zuo , Fengxiang He

Although Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms have found tremendous success in simulated domains, they often cannot directly be applied to physical systems, especially in cases where there are hard constraints to satisfy (e.g. on safety…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-28 Harsh Satija , Philip Amortila , Joelle Pineau

Markov decision processes (MDPs) are used to model a wide variety of applications ranging from game playing over robotics to finance. Their optimal policy typically maximizes the expected sum of rewards given at each step of the decision…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-26 Maximilian Nägele , Jan Olle , Thomas Fösel , Remmy Zen , Florian Marquardt

This work addresses the problem of offline safe imitation learning (IL), where the goal is to learn safe and reward-maximizing policies from demonstrations that do not have per-timestep safety cost or reward information. In many real-world…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Returaj Burnwal , Nirav Pravinbhai Bhatt , Balaraman Ravindran

A Markov Decision Process (MDP) is a popular model for reinforcement learning. However, its commonly used assumption of stationary dynamics and rewards is too stringent and fails to hold in adversarial, nonstationary, or multi-agent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-22 Tiancheng Yu , Suvrit Sra

Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms have shown tremendous success in simulation environments, but their application to real-world problems faces significant challenges, with safety being a major concern. In particular, enforcing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-19 Weiye Zhao , Rui Chen , Yifan Sun , Tianhao Wei , Changliu Liu

Efficient exploration is one of the main challenges in reinforcement learning (RL). Most existing sample-efficient algorithms assume the existence of a single reward function during exploration. In many practical scenarios, however, there…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-18 Xuezhou Zhang , Yuzhe ma , Adish Singla

Many real-world multiagent learning problems involve safety concerns. In these setups, typical safe reinforcement learning algorithms constrain agents' behavior, limiting exploration -- a crucial component for discovering effective…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2025-08-27 Ayhan Alp Aydeniz , Enrico Marchesini , Robert Loftin , Christopher Amato , Kagan Tumer

The increasing use of autonomous and semi-autonomous agents in society has made it crucial to validate their safety. However, the complex scenarios in which they are used may make formal verification impossible. To address this challenge,…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-03-03 Jared J. Beard , Ali Baheri

We study the policy testing problem in discounted Markov decision processes (MDPs) in the fixed-confidence setting under a generative model with static sampling. The goal is to decide whether the value of a given policy exceeds a specified…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-21 Kaito Ariu , Po-An Wang , Alexandre Proutiere , Kenshi Abe

The goal of meta-reinforcement learning (meta-RL) is to build agents that can quickly learn new tasks by leveraging prior experience on related tasks. Learning a new task often requires both exploring to gather task-relevant information and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-15 Evan Zheran Liu , Aditi Raghunathan , Percy Liang , Chelsea Finn

The continuous nature of belief states in POMDPs presents significant computational challenges in learning the optimal policy. In this paper, we consider an approach that solves a Partially Observable Reinforcement Learning (PORL) problem…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-15 Ameya Anjarlekar , Rasoul Etesami , R Srikant

This paper presents the concept of an adaptive safe padding that forces Reinforcement Learning (RL) to synthesise optimal control policies while ensuring safety during the learning process. Policies are synthesised to satisfy a goal,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-24 Mohammadhosein Hasanbeig , Alessandro Abate , Daniel Kroening