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Related papers: Learning Barrier Certificates: Towards Safe Reinfo…

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Barrier certificates are scalar functions over the state space of dynamical systems that separate all unsafe states from all reachable states. The existence of a barrier certificate formally verifies the safety of the dynamical system.…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-05-05 Miriam Kranzlmüller , Lukas Koller , Tobias Ladner , Matthias Althoff

Reinforcement learning (RL) offers a compelling data-driven paradigm for synthesizing controllers for complex systems when accurate physical models are unavailable; however, most existing control-oriented RL methods assume stationarity and,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-22 Austin Coursey , Abel Diaz-Gonzalez , Marcos Quinones-Grueiro , Gautam Biswas

Recent advances in Deep Machine Learning have shown promise in solving complex perception and control loops via methods such as reinforcement and imitation learning. However, guaranteeing safety for such learned deep policies has been a…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-03-03 Tom Hirshberg , Sai Vemprala , Ashish Kapoor

Guaranteeing safe behaviour of reinforcement learning (RL) policies poses significant challenges for safety-critical applications, despite RL's generality and scalability. To address this, we propose a new approach to apply verification…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-06 Daniel C. H. Tan , Fernando Acero , Robert McCarthy , Dimitrios Kanoulas , Zhibin Li

As safety is of paramount importance in robotics, reinforcement learning that reflects safety, called safe RL, has been studied extensively. In safe RL, we aim to find a policy which maximizes the desired return while satisfying the defined…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-12-04 Dohyeong Kim , Songhwai Oh

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) that solves constraint-satisfactory policies provides a promising way to the broader safety-critical applications of RL in real-world problems such as robotics. Among all safe RL approaches, model-based…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-10-17 Dongjie Yu , Wenjun Zou , Yujie Yang , Haitong Ma , Shengbo Eben Li , Jingliang Duan , Jianyu Chen

Learning-enabled control systems have demonstrated impressive empirical performance on challenging control problems in robotics, but this performance comes at the cost of reduced transparency and lack of guarantees on the safety or…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-12-21 Charles Dawson , Sicun Gao , Chuchu Fan

Merely pursuing performance may adversely affect the safety, while a conservative policy for safe exploration will degrade the performance. How to balance the safety and performance in learning-based control problems is an interesting yet…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-01-28 Xinyang Wang , Hongwei Zhang , Shimin Wang , Wei Xiao , Martin Guay

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

To effectively control complex dynamical systems, accurate nonlinear models are typically needed. However, these models are not always known. In this paper, we present a data-driven approach based on Gaussian processes that learns models of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-10-17 Li Wang , Evangelos A. Theodorou , Magnus Egerstedt

Established techniques that enable robots to learn from demonstrations are based on learning a stable dynamical system (DS). To increase the robots' resilience to perturbations during tasks that involve static obstacle avoidance, we propose…

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

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) seeks to mitigate unsafe behaviors that arise from exploration during training by reducing constraint violations while maintaining task performance. Existing approaches typically rely on a single policy to…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Murad Dawood , Usama Ahmed Siddiquie , Shahram Khorshidi , Maren Bennewitz

Reinforcement learning (RL) has been widely used in decision-making and control tasks, but the risk is very high for the agent in the training process due to the requirements of interaction with the environment, which seriously limits its…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-13 Xuemin Hu , Pan Chen , Yijun Wen , Bo Tang , Long Chen

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) with assured satisfaction of hard state constraints during training has recently received a lot of attention. Safety filters, e.g., based on control barrier functions (CBFs), provide a promising way for safe…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-08-30 Yikun Cheng , Pan Zhao , Naira Hovakimyan

This paper addresses the problem of maintaining safety during training in Reinforcement Learning (RL), such that the safety constraint violations are bounded at any point during learning. In a variety of RL applications the safety of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-19 Rohan Mitta , Hosein Hasanbeig , Jun Wang , Daniel Kroening , Yiannis Kantaros , Alessandro Abate

Safety is an essential component for deploying reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms in real-world scenarios, and is critical during the learning process itself. A natural first approach toward safe RL is to manually specify constraints on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-29 Krishnan Srinivasan , Benjamin Eysenbach , Sehoon Ha , Jie Tan , Chelsea Finn

Reinforcement learning (RL), while powerful and expressive, can often prioritize performance at the expense of safety. Yet safety violations can lead to catastrophic outcomes in real-world deployments. Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) offer…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-19 Lizhi Yang , Blake Werner , Massimiliano de Sa , Aaron D. Ames

Reinforcement learning (RL) can improve control performance by seeking to learn optimal control policies in the end-use environment for vehicles and other systems. To accomplish this, RL algorithms need to sufficiently explore the state and…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-05-21 Habtamu Hailemichael , Beshah Ayalew , Andrej Ivanco

Safety is a critical concern when deploying reinforcement learning agents for realistic tasks. Recently, safe reinforcement learning algorithms have been developed to optimize the agent's performance while avoiding violations of safety…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-05 Baiming Chen , Zuxin Liu , Jiacheng Zhu , Mengdi Xu , Wenhao Ding , Ding Zhao