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Related papers: Learning Barrier Certificates: Towards Safe Reinfo…

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Safety in reinforcement learning (RL) is a key property in both training and execution in many domains such as autonomous driving or finance. In this paper, we formalize it with a constrained RL formulation in the distributional RL setting.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-01 Jianyi Zhang , Paul Weng

Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) have emerged as a prominent approach to designing safe navigation systems of robots. Despite their popularity, current CBF-based methods exhibit some limitations: optimization-based safe control techniques…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Junjun Xie , Shuhao Zhao , Liang Hu , Huijun Gao

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

Safety is the major consideration in controlling complex dynamical systems using reinforcement learning (RL), where the safety certificate can provide provable safety guarantee. A valid safety certificate is an energy function indicating…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-27 Haitong Ma , Changliu Liu , Shengbo Eben Li , Sifa Zheng , Jianyu Chen

Safe reinforcement learning is a promising path toward applying reinforcement learning algorithms to real-world problems, where suboptimal behaviors may lead to actual negative consequences. In this work, we focus on the setting where…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-17 Garrett Thomas , Yuping Luo , Tengyu Ma

An emerging field of sequential decision problems is safe Reinforcement Learning (RL), where the objective is to maximize the reward while obeying safety constraints. Being able to handle constraints is essential for deploying RL agents in…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-03-08 Nick Bührer , Zhejun Zhang , Alexander Liniger , Fisher Yu , Luc Van Gool

In safe Reinforcement Learning (RL), safety cost is typically defined as a function dependent on the immediate state and actions. In practice, safety constraints can often be non-Markovian due to the insufficient fidelity of state…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-07 Siow Meng Low , Akshat Kumar

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

We propose Convex Constraint Learning for Reinforcement Learning (CoCoRL), a novel approach for inferring shared constraints in a Constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP) from a set of safe demonstrations with possibly different reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-05 David Lindner , Xin Chen , Sebastian Tschiatschek , Katja Hofmann , Andreas Krause

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn policies that satisfy certain constraints before deploying them to safety-critical applications. Previous primal-dual style approaches suffer from instability issues and lack optimality…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-20 Zuxin Liu , Zhepeng Cen , Vladislav Isenbaev , Wei Liu , Zhiwei Steven Wu , Bo Li , Ding Zhao

This paper offers a direct data-driven approach for learning robust control barrier certificates (R-CBCs) and robust safety controllers (R-SCs) for discrete-time input-affine polynomial systems with unknown dynamics under…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-07-22 Omid Akbarzadeh , MohammadHossein Ashoori , Abolfazl Lavaei

Model-free Reinforcement Learning (RL) offers an attractive approach to learn control policies for high-dimensional systems, but its relatively poor sample complexity often forces training in simulated environments. Even in simulation,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2018-09-18 Boris Ivanovic , James Harrison , Apoorva Sharma , Mo Chen , Marco Pavone

The rapid integration of AI algorithms in safety-critical applications such as autonomous driving and healthcare is raising significant concerns about the ability to meet stringent safety standards. Traditional tools for formal safety…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Oliver Schön , Zhengang Zhong , Sadegh Soudjani

Learning from Demonstration (LfD) is a powerful method for enabling robots to perform novel tasks as it is often more tractable for a non-roboticist end-user to demonstrate the desired skill and for the robot to efficiently learn from the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-03-08 Yue Yang , Letian Chen , Matthew Gombolay

Reinforcement learning (RL) exhibits impressive performance when managing complicated control tasks for robots. However, its wide application to physical robots is limited by the absence of strong safety guarantees. To overcome this…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-05-18 Desong Du , Shaohang Han , Naiming Qi , Haitham Bou Ammar , Jun Wang , Wei Pan

We study the problem of safe offline reinforcement learning (RL), the goal is to learn a policy that maximizes long-term reward while satisfying safety constraints given only offline data, without further interaction with the environment.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-11 Haoran Xu , Xianyuan Zhan , Xiangyu Zhu

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

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) algorithms have been successfully applied to control tasks associated with unmanned aerial vehicles and robotics. In recent years, safe RL has been proposed to allow the safe execution of RL algorithms in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Austin Coursey , Marcos Quinones-Grueiro , Gautam Biswas

Safety is a primary concern when applying reinforcement learning to real-world control tasks, especially in the presence of external disturbances. However, existing safe reinforcement learning algorithms rarely account for external…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-12 Zeyang Li , Chuxiong Hu , Shengbo Eben Li , Jia Cheng , Yunan Wang