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In real-life scenarios, a Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent aiming to maximise their reward, must often also behave in a safe manner, including at training time. Thus, much attention in recent years has been given to Safe RL, where an agent…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-03-26 Edwin Hamel-De le Court , Francesco Belardinelli , Alexander W. Goodall

This paper proposes a safe reinforcement learning (RL) framework based on forward-invariance-induced action-space design. The control problem is cast as a Markov decision process, but instead of relying on runtime shielding or penalty-based…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-04-10 Chieh Tsai , Muhammad Junayed Hasan Zahed , Salim Hariri , Hossein Rastgoftar

Safety is one of the biggest concerns to applying reinforcement learning (RL) to the physical world. In its core part, it is challenging to ensure RL agents persistently satisfy a hard state constraint without white-box or black-box…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-10-19 Weiye Zhao , Tairan He , Changliu Liu

Deep reinforcement learning has been successfully used in many dynamic decision making domains, especially those with very large state spaces. However, it is also well-known that deep reinforcement learning can be very slow and resource…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-10-23 Haodi Zhang , Zihang Gao , Yi Zhou , Hao Zhang , Kaishun Wu , Fangzhen Lin

Control applications present hard operational constraints. A violation of these can result in unsafe behavior. This paper introduces Safe Interactive Model Based Learning (SiMBL), a framework to refine an existing controller and a system…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2019-11-19 Marco Gallieri , Seyed Sina Mirrazavi Salehian , Nihat Engin Toklu , Alessio Quaglino , Jonathan Masci , Jan Koutník , Faustino Gomez

Ensuring human safety in collaborative robotics can compromise efficiency because traditional safety measures increase robot cycle time when human interaction is frequent. This paper proposes a safety-aware approach to mitigate efficiency…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-12-22 M. Faroni , A. Spano , A. M. Zanchettin , P. Rocco

This paper proposes a framework for safe reinforcement learning that can handle stochastic nonlinear dynamical systems. We focus on the setting where the nominal dynamics are known, and are subject to additive stochastic disturbances with…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-01-27 Shuo Li , Osbert Bastani

Recently, safe reinforcement learning (RL) with the actor-critic structure for continuous control tasks has received increasing attention. It is still challenging to learn a near-optimal control policy with safety and convergence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-06 Xinglong Zhang , Yaoqian Peng , Biao Luo , Wei Pan , Xin Xu , Haibin Xie

This paper presents a safety-critical reinforcement learning framework for nonlinear dynamical systems with continuous state and input spaces operating under explicit physical constraints. Hard safety constraints are enforced independently…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-02-05 Hossein Rastgoftar

Many current autonomous systems are being designed with a strong reliance on black box predictions from deep neural networks (DNNs). However, DNNs tend to be overconfident in predictions on unseen data and can give unpredictable results for…

Robotics · Computer Science 2019-03-04 Björn Lütjens , Michael Everett , Jonathan P. How

Designing Reinforcement Learning (RL) solutions for real-life problems remains a significant challenge. A major area of concern is safety. "Shielding" is a popular technique to enforce safety in RL by turning user-defined safety…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-31 Alexander Politowicz , Sahisnu Mazumder , Bing Liu

Safety is one of the main challenges in applying reinforcement learning to realistic environmental tasks. To ensure safety during and after training process, existing methods tend to adopt overly conservative policy to avoid unsafe…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-27 Xiao Zhang , Hai Zhang , Hongtu Zhou , Chang Huang , Di Zhang , Chen Ye , Junqiao Zhao

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) has shown promising results in the motion planning of manipulators. However, no method guarantees the safety of highly dynamic obstacles, such as humans, in RL-based manipulator control. This lack of formal…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-05-16 Jakob Thumm , Matthias Althoff

This paper considers Safe Policy Improvement (SPI) in Batch Reinforcement Learning (Batch RL): from a fixed dataset and without direct access to the true environment, train a policy that is guaranteed to perform at least as well as the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-11 Romain Laroche , Paul Trichelair , Rémi Tachet des Combes

Safe learning of locomotion skills is still an open problem. Indeed, the intrinsically unstable nature of the open-loop dynamics of locomotion systems renders naive learning from scratch prone to catastrophic failures in the real world. In…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-07-17 Xun Pua , Majid Khadiv

Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown promise in addressing complex robotic challenges. In real-world applications, RL is often accompanied by failsafe controllers as a last resort to avoid catastrophic events. While necessary for…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-09-26 Jakob Thumm , Guillaume Pelat , Matthias Althoff

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

With the rapidly growing interest in autonomous navigation, the body of research on motion planning and collision avoidance techniques has enjoyed an accelerating rate of novel proposals and developments. However, the complexity of new…

Robotics · Computer Science 2018-06-06 Vahid Behzadan , Arslan Munir

This tutorial paper focuses on safe physics-informed machine learning in the context of dynamics and control, providing a comprehensive overview of how to integrate physical models and safety guarantees. As machine learning techniques…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-06-16 Jan Drgona , Truong X. Nghiem , Thomas Beckers , Mahyar Fazlyab , Enrique Mallada , Colin Jones , Draguna Vrabie , Steven L. Brunton , Rolf Findeisen

Safe reinforcement learning deals with mitigating or avoiding unsafe situations by reinforcement learning (RL) agents. Safe RL approaches are based on specific risk representations for particular problems or domains. In order to analyze…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-11 Leonardo Villalobos-Arias , Derek Martin , Abhijeet Krishnan , Madeleine Gagné , Colin M. Potts , Arnav Jhala