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We address the problem of deploying a reinforcement learning (RL) agent on a physical system such as a datacenter cooling unit or robot, where critical constraints must never be violated. We show how to exploit the typically smooth dynamics…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-01-29 Gal Dalal , Krishnamurthy Dvijotham , Matej Vecerik , Todd Hester , Cosmin Paduraru , Yuval Tassa

Cost functions are commonly employed in Safe Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL). However, the cost is typically encoded as an indicator function due to the difficulty of quantifying the risk of policy decisions in the state space. Such an…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-02-21 Enrico Marchesini , Luca Marzari , Alessandro Farinelli , Christopher Amato

We study the problem of learning controllers for discrete-time non-linear stochastic dynamical systems with formal reach-avoid guarantees. This work presents the first method for providing formal reach-avoid guarantees, which combine and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-30 Đorđe Žikelić , Mathias Lechner , Thomas A. Henzinger , Krishnendu Chatterjee

Safety is a crucial necessity in many applications of reinforcement learning (RL), whether robotic, automotive, or medical. Many existing approaches to safe RL rely on receiving numeric safety feedback, but in many cases this feedback can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-27 Andrew Bennett , Dipendra Misra , Nathan Kallus

Safety of stochastic dynamic systems in environments with dynamic obstacles is studied in this paper through the lens of stochastic barrier functions. We introduce both time-invariant and time-varying barrier certificates for discrete-time,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-04-23 Rayan Mazouz , Luca Laurenti , Morteza Lahijanian

Q-learning is a promising method for solving optimal control problems for uncertain systems without the explicit need for system identification. However, approaches for continuous-time Q-learning have limited provable safety guarantees,…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-01-30 Soutrik Bandyopadhyay , Shubhendu Bhasin

Structural vibrations induced by external excitations pose significant risks, including safety hazards for occupants, structural damage, and increased maintenance costs. While conventional model-based control strategies, such as Linear…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Rohan Vitthal Thorat , Juhi Singh , Rajdip Nayek

The rapid advancement of machine learning (ML) has led to its increasing integration into cyber-physical systems (CPS) across diverse domains. While CPS offer powerful capabilities, incorporating ML components introduces significant safety…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-15 Calum Corrie Imrie , Ioannis Stefanakos , Sepeedeh Shahbeigi , Richard Hawkins , Simon Burton

In safe reinforcement learning (RL), auxiliary safety costs are used to align the agent to safe decision making. In practice, safety constraints, including cost functions and budgets, are unknown or hard to specify, as it requires…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-24 Siow Meng Low , Akshat Kumar

Autonomous vehicles with a self-evolving ability are expected to cope with unknown scenarios in the real-world environment. Take advantage of trial and error mechanism, reinforcement learning is able to self evolve by learning the optimal…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-08-23 Shuo Yang , Liwen Wang , Yanjun Huang , Hong Chen

Ensuring safety via safety filters in real-world robotics presents significant challenges, particularly when the system dynamics is complex or unavailable. To handle this issue, learning-based safety filters recently gained popularity,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-12-02 Guo Ning Sue , Yogita Choudhary , Richard Desatnik , Carmel Majidi , John Dolan , Guanya Shi

A popular framework for enforcing safe actions in Reinforcement Learning (RL) is Constrained RL, where trajectory based constraints on expected cost (or other cost measures) are employed to enforce safety and more importantly these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-09 Huy Hoang , Tien Mai , Pradeep Varakantham

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) trains a policy to maximize the task reward while satisfying safety constraints. While prior works focus on the performance optimality, we find that the optimal solutions of many safe RL problems are not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-03 Zuxin Liu , Zijian Guo , Zhepeng Cen , Huan Zhang , Jie Tan , Bo Li , Ding Zhao

Vanilla Reinforcement Learning (RL) can efficiently solve complex tasks but does not provide any guarantees on system behavior. To bridge this gap, we propose a three-step safe RL procedure for continuous action spaces that provides…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-09-29 Hanna Krasowski , Prithvi Akella , Aaron D. Ames , Matthias Althoff

Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning (GCRL) provides a versatile framework for developing unified controllers capable of handling wide ranges of tasks, exploring environments, and adapting behaviors. However, its reliance on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-20 Charly Pecqueux-Guézénec , Stéphane Doncieux , Nicolas Perrin-Gilbert

Ensuring the safety of reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms is crucial to unlock their potential for many real-world tasks. However, vanilla RL and most safe RL approaches do not guarantee safety. In recent years, several methods have…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-21 Hanna Krasowski , Jakob Thumm , Marlon Müller , Lukas Schäfer , Xiao Wang , Matthias Althoff

The applicability of reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms in real-world domains often requires adherence to safety constraints, a need difficult to address given the asymptotic nature of the classic RL optimization objective. In contrast…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-15 Moritz A. Zanger , Karam Daaboul , J. Marius Zöllner

In safety-critical applications, autonomous agents may need to learn in an environment where mistakes can be very costly. In such settings, the agent needs to behave safely not only after but also while learning. To achieve this, existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-22 Matteo Turchetta , Andrey Kolobov , Shital Shah , Andreas Krause , Alekh Agarwal

Reinforcement learning (RL) agents with pre-specified reward functions cannot provide guaranteed safety across variety of circumstances that an uncertain system might encounter. To guarantee performance while assuring satisfaction of safety…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-04-20 Aquib Mustafa , Majid Mazouchi , Subramanya Nageshrao , Hamidreza Modares

Ensuring strict safety guarantees is the paramount challenge for emerging 5G/6G wireless systems, particularly as they increasingly govern mission-critical applications ranging from autonomous UAV swarms to industrial automation. While deep…

Signal Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-04-21 Haoran Peng , Tong Wu , Hang Liu , Weijia Zheng , Ying-Jun Angela Zhang , Anna Scaglione