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Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods have been proven successful in solving manipulation tasks autonomously. However, RL is still not widely adopted on real robotic systems because working with real hardware entails additional challenges,…

Ensuring safety is a crucial challenge when deploying reinforcement learning (RL) to real-world systems. We develop confidence-based safety filters, a control-theoretic approach for certifying state safety constraints for nominal policies…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-05 Sebastian Curi , Armin Lederer , Sandra Hirche , Andreas Krause

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

Reinforcement learning is a powerful paradigm for learning optimal policies from experimental data. However, to find optimal policies, most reinforcement learning algorithms explore all possible actions, which may be harmful for real-world…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-11-15 Felix Berkenkamp , Matteo Turchetta , Angela P. Schoellig , Andreas Krause

Groundbreaking successes have been achieved by Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) in solving practical decision-making problems. Robotics, in particular, can involve high-cost hardware and human interactions. Hence, scrupulous evaluations of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-10-20 Davide Corsi , Enrico Marchesini , Alessandro Farinelli

The last half-decade has seen a steep rise in the number of contributions on safe learning methods for real-world robotic deployments from both the control and reinforcement learning communities. This article provides a concise but holistic…

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) in the real world necessitates the development of procedures that enable agents to explore without causing harm to themselves or others. The most successful solutions to the problem of safe RL leverage offline…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-09 Alexander Quessy , Thomas Richardson , Sebastian East

The transfer of reinforcement learning (RL) techniques into real-world applications is challenged by safety requirements in the presence of physical limitations. Most RL methods, in particular the most popular algorithms, do not support…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2021-05-18 Kim P. Wabersich , Melanie N. Zeilinger

Sequential decision making under uncertainty is central to many Process Systems Engineering (PSE) challenges, where traditional methods often face limitations related to controlling and optimizing complex and stochastic systems.…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-10-29 Maximilian Bloor , Max Mowbray , Ehecatl Antonio Del Rio Chanona , Calvin Tsay

This paper investigates the so-called reward-balancing methods, a novel class of algorithms for solving discounted-return reinforcement learning (RL) problems. These methods consist of iteratively adjusting the reward function to transform…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-23 Simone Baroncini , Bahman Gharesifard , Giuseppe Notarstefano

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

Safety guarantees are a prerequisite to the deployment of reinforcement learning (RL) agents in safety-critical tasks. Often, deployment environments exhibit non-stationary dynamics or are subject to changing performance goals, requiring…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-13 Maksim Anisimov , Francesco Belardinelli , Matthew Wicker

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) often leverage Reinforcement Learning (RL) techniques to adapt dynamically to changing environments and optimize performance. However, it is challenging to construct safety cases for RL components. We therefore…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-03-13 Katherine Dearstyne , Pedro , Alarcon Granadeno , Theodore Chambers , Jane Cleland-Huang

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms can achieve state-of-the-art performance in decision-making and continuous control tasks. However, applying RL algorithms on safety-critical systems still needs to be well justified due to the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-11-22 Mahmoud Selim , Amr Alanwar , M. Watheq El-Kharashi , Hazem M. Abbas , Karl H. Johansson

Reinforcement learning (RL) agents need to explore their environments in order to learn optimal policies. In many environments and tasks, safety is of critical importance. The widespread use of simulators offers a number of advantages,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-03-01 Luka Kovač , Igor Farkaš

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

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

In many real-world reinforcement learning (RL) problems, besides optimizing the main objective function, an agent must concurrently avoid violating a number of constraints. In particular, besides optimizing performance it is crucial to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-05-22 Yinlam Chow , Ofir Nachum , Edgar Duenez-Guzman , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh

Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms have achieved remarkable performance in decision making and control tasks due to their ability to reason about long-term, cumulative reward using trial and error. However, during RL training, applying…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-03-03 Yifei Simon Shao , Chao Chen , Shreyas Kousik , Ram Vasudevan