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Related papers: Towards Safe Reinforcement Learning with a Safety …

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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

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 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 (RL) agents accomplish given tasks while adhering to specific constraints. Employing constraints expressed via easily-understandable human language offers considerable potential for real-world applications due to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-16 Xingzhou Lou , Junge Zhang , Ziyan Wang , Kaiqi Huang , Yali Du

Reinforcement learning (RL) involves performing exploratory actions in an unknown system. This can place a learning agent in dangerous and potentially catastrophic system states. Current approaches for tackling safe learning in RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-02 David Mguni , Usman Islam , Yaqi Sun , Xiuling Zhang , Joel Jennings , Aivar Sootla , Changmin Yu , Ziyan Wang , Jun Wang , Yaodong Yang

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved significant success on risk-sensitive tasks and shown promise in autonomous driving (AD) as well. Considering the distinctiveness of this community, efficient and reproducible baselines are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-20 Linrui Zhang , Qin Zhang , Li Shen , Bo Yuan , Xueqian Wang

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

Offline safe reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn policies from a fixed dataset while maximizing performance under cumulative cost constraints. In practice, deployment requirements often vary across scenarios, necessitating a single…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Wensong Bai , Chao Zhang , Qihang Xu , Chufan Chen , Chenhao Zhou , Hui Qian

A safe and efficient decision-making system is crucial for autonomous vehicles. However, the complexity of driving environments limits the effectiveness of many rule-based and machine learning approaches. Reinforcement Learning (RL), with…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Rongliang Zhou , Jiakun Huang , Mingjun Li , Hepeng Li , Haotian Cao , Xiaolin Song

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

Safe reinforcement learning (Safe RL) refers to a class of techniques that aim to prevent RL algorithms from violating constraints in the process of decision-making and exploration during trial and error. In this paper, a novel model-free…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-08-14 Homayoun Honari , Mehran Ghafarian Tamizi , Homayoun Najjaran

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) excels in various control tasks, yet the absence of safety guarantees hampers its real-world applicability. In particular, explorations during learning usually results in safety violations, while the RL…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Yifan Sun , Feihan Li , Weiye Zhao , Rui Chen , Tianhao Wei , Changliu Liu

We consider the reinforcement learning (RL) problem with general utilities which consists in maximizing a function of the state-action occupancy measure. Beyond the standard cumulative reward RL setting, this problem includes as particular…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-06 Anas Barakat , Ilyas Fatkhullin , Niao He

Reinforcement learning (RL) agents are vulnerable to adversarial disturbances, which can deteriorate task performance or compromise safety specifications. Existing methods either address safety requirements under the assumption of no…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-14 Zeyang Li , Chuxiong Hu , Yunan Wang , Yujie Yang , Shengbo Eben Li

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) trains a constraint satisfaction policy by interacting with the environment. We aim to tackle a more challenging problem: learning a safe policy from an offline dataset. We study the offline safe RL problem…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-22 Zuxin Liu , Zijian Guo , Yihang Yao , Zhepeng Cen , Wenhao Yu , Tingnan Zhang , Ding Zhao

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) studies problems where an intelligent agent has to not only maximize reward but also avoid exploring unsafe areas. In this study, we propose CUP, a novel policy optimization method based on Constrained…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-10 Long Yang , Jiaming Ji , Juntao Dai , Linrui Zhang , Binbin Zhou , Pengfei Li , Yaodong Yang , Gang Pan

Incorporating safety is an essential prerequisite for broadening the practical applications of reinforcement learning in real-world scenarios. To tackle this challenge, Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs) are leveraged, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-03 Jaafar Mhamed , Shangding Gu

We develop provably safe and convergent reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms for control of nonlinear dynamical systems, bridging the gap between the hard safety guarantees of control theory and the convergence guarantees of RL theory.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-08 Wesley A. Suttle , Vipul K. Sharma , Krishna C. Kosaraju , S. Sivaranjani , Ji Liu , Vijay Gupta , Brian M. Sadler

Projection-based safety filters, which modify unsafe actions by mapping them to the closest safe alternative, are widely used to enforce safety constraints in reinforcement learning (RL). Two integration strategies are commonly considered:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Hannah Markgraf , Shambhuraj Sawant , Hanna Krasowski , Lukas Schäfer , Sebastien Gros , Matthias Althoff

This dissertation investigates how reinforcement learning (RL) methods can be designed to be safe, sample-efficient, and robust. Framed through the unifying perspective of contextual-bandit RL, the work addresses two major application…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-20 Shashank Gupta