English
Related papers

Related papers: Safe Policy Optimization with Local Generalized Li…

200 papers

Local Policy Search is a popular reinforcement learning approach for handling large state spaces. Formally, it searches locally in a paramet erized policy space in order to maximize the associated value function averaged over some…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-06-07 Bruno Scherrer , Matthieu Geist

The ability to discover approximately optimal policies in domains with sparse rewards is crucial to applying reinforcement learning (RL) in many real-world scenarios. Approaches such as neural density models and continuous exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-25 Bogdan Mazoure , Thang Doan , Audrey Durand , R Devon Hjelm , Joelle Pineau

During initial iterations of training in most Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms, agents perform a significant number of random exploratory steps. In the real world, this can limit the practicality of these algorithms as it can lead to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-17 Ashish Kumar Jayant , Shalabh Bhatnagar

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

A precondition for the deployment of a Reinforcement Learning agent to a real-world system is to provide guarantees on the learning process. While a learning algorithm will eventually converge to a good policy, there are no guarantees on…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-12-27 Paul Daoudi , Mathias Formoso , Othman Gaizi , Achraf Azize , Evrard Garcelon

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

It is challenging for reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms to succeed in real-world applications like financial trading and logistic system due to the noisy observation and environment shifting between training and evaluation. Thus, it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-20 Zhengyu Yang , Kan Ren , Xufang Luo , Minghuan Liu , Weiqing Liu , Jiang Bian , Weinan Zhang , Dongsheng Li

Reinforcement learning is a widely used approach to autonomous navigation, showing potential in various tasks and robotic setups. Still, it often struggles to reach distant goals when safety constraints are imposed (e.g., the wheeled robot…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-08-27 Brian Angulo , Gregory Gorbov , Aleksandr Panov , Konstantin Yakovlev

In many real-world applications, safety constraints for reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are either unknown or not explicitly defined. We propose a framework that concurrently learns safety constraints and optimal RL policies in such…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-05-02 Lunet Yifru , Ali Baheri

Safe Reinforcement Learning (Safe RL) aims to train an RL agent to maximize its performance in real-world environments while adhering to safety constraints, as exceeding safety violation limits can result in severe consequences. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-07 Hanping Zhang , Yuhong Guo

Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved promising results on most robotic control tasks. Safety of learning-based controllers is an essential notion of ensuring the effectiveness of the controllers. Current methods adopt whole consistency…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-07-31 Haotian Xu , Shengjie Wang , Zhaolei Wang , Yunzhe Zhang , Qing Zhuo , Yang Gao , Tao Zhang

Designing reliable decision strategies for autonomous urban driving is challenging. Reinforcement learning (RL) has been used to automatically derive suitable behavior in uncertain environments, but it does not provide any guarantee on the…

In offline reinforcement learning (RL), we learn policies from fixed datasets without environment interaction. The major challenges are to provide guarantees on the (1) performance and (2) safety of the resulting policy. A technique called…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Maris F. L. Galesloot , Thomas Rhemrev , Nils Jansen

Reinforcement learning (RL) problems are fundamental in online decision-making and have been instrumental in finding an optimal policy for Markov decision processes (MDPs). Function approximations are usually deployed to handle large or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Jiashuo Jiang , Yiming Zong , Yinyu Ye

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

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

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

Safe reinforcement learning aims to learn the optimal policy while satisfying safety constraints, which is essential in real-world applications. However, current algorithms still struggle for efficient policy updates with hard constraint…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-20 Linrui Zhang , Li Shen , Long Yang , Shixiang Chen , Bo Yuan , Xueqian Wang , Dacheng Tao

For many applications of reinforcement learning it can be more convenient to specify both a reward function and constraints, rather than trying to design behavior through the reward function. For example, systems that physically interact…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-05-31 Joshua Achiam , David Held , Aviv Tamar , Pieter Abbeel

Reinforcement learning (RL) is ubiquitous in the development of modern AI systems. However, state-of-the-art RL agents require extensive, and potentially unsafe, interactions with their environments to learn effectively. These limitations…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-01 Yarden As , Bhavya Sukhija , Lenart Treven , Carmelo Sferrazza , Stelian Coros , Andreas Krause