English
Related papers

Related papers: Towards Safe Reinforcement Learning via Constraini…

200 papers

In environments with delayed observation, state augmentation by including actions within the delay window is adopted to retrieve Markovian property to enable reinforcement learning (RL). However, state-of-the-art (SOTA) RL techniques with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-23 Qingyuan Wu , Simon Sinong Zhan , Yixuan Wang , Yuhui Wang , Chung-Wei Lin , Chen Lv , Qi Zhu , Chao Huang

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

We propose Convex Constraint Learning for Reinforcement Learning (CoCoRL), a novel approach for inferring shared constraints in a Constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP) from a set of safe demonstrations with possibly different reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-05 David Lindner , Xin Chen , Sebastian Tschiatschek , Katja Hofmann , Andreas Krause

Optimal control strategies are often combined with safety certificates to ensure both performance and safety in safety-critical systems. A prominent example is combining Model Predictive Control (MPC) with Control Barrier Functions (CBF).…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-12-05 Kerim Dzhumageldyev , Filippo Airaldi , Azita Dabiri

Reinforcement learning (RL) has been widely used in decision-making and control tasks, but the risk is very high for the agent in the training process due to the requirements of interaction with the environment, which seriously limits its…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-13 Xuemin Hu , Pan Chen , Yijun Wen , Bo Tang , Long Chen

Recently, there has been a surge in interest in safe and robust techniques within reinforcement learning (RL). Current notions of risk in RL fail to capture the potential for systemic failures such as abrupt stoppages from system failures…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2019-10-09 David Mguni

In standard reinforcement learning (RL), a learning agent seeks to optimize the overall reward. However, many key aspects of a desired behavior are more naturally expressed as constraints. For instance, the designer may want to limit the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-29 Sobhan Miryoosefi , Kianté Brantley , Hal Daumé , Miroslav Dudik , Robert Schapire

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has become a popular method for solving control problems in power systems. Conventional DRL encourages the agent to explore various policies encoded in a neural network (NN) with the goal of maximizing the…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-10-28 Tong Wu , Anna Scaglione , Daniel Arnold

Training-time safety violations have been a major concern when we deploy reinforcement learning algorithms in the real world. This paper explores the possibility of safe RL algorithms with zero training-time safety violations in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-14 Yuping Luo , Tengyu Ma

We study online reinforcement learning (RL) in non-stationary environments, where a time-varying exogenous context process affects the environment dynamics. Online RL is challenging in such environments due to "catastrophic forgetting"…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-01 Pouya Hamadanian , Arash Nasr-Esfahany , Malte Schwarzkopf , Siddartha Sen , Mohammad Alizadeh

In deep Reinforcement Learning (RL), the learning rate critically influences both stability and performance, yet its optimal value shifts during training as the environment and policy evolve. Standard decay schedulers assume monotonic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-09 Henrique Donâncio , Antoine Barrier , Leah F. South , Florence Forbes

Autonomous agents must often deal with conflicting requirements, such as completing tasks using the least amount of time/energy, learning multiple tasks, or dealing with multiple opponents. In the context of reinforcement learning~(RL),…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-30 Santiago Paternain , Luiz F. O. Chamon , Miguel Calvo-Fullana , Alejandro Ribeiro

Constrained reinforcement learning (CRL) has gained significant interest recently, since safety constraints satisfaction is critical for real-world problems. However, existing CRL methods constraining discounted cumulative costs generally…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-08 Dongjie Yu , Haitong Ma , Shengbo Eben Li , Jianyu Chen

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) offers advanced solutions to constrained optimal control problems. Existing studies in safe RL implicitly assume continuity in policy functions, where policies map states to actions in a smooth,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-29 Wenjun Zou , Yao Lyu , Jie Li , Yujie Yang , Shengbo Eben Li , Jingliang Duan , Xianyuan Zhan , Jingjing Liu , Yaqin Zhang , Keqiang Li

Although well-established in general reinforcement learning (RL), value-based methods are rarely explored in constrained RL (CRL) for their incapability of finding policies that can randomize among multiple actions. To apply value-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-28 Tianchi Cai , Wenpeng Zhang , Lihong Gu , Xiaodong Zeng , Jinjie Gu

Safe reinforcement learning (SafeRL) is a prominent paradigm for autonomous driving, where agents are required to optimize performance under strict safety requirements. This dual objective creates a fundamental tension, as overly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-24 Mahesh Keswani , Raunak Bhattacharyya

Reinforcement learning (RL) policies deployed in safety-critical systems, such as unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) navigation in dynamic airspace, are vulnerable to out-ofdistribution (OOD) adversarial attacks in the observation space. These…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-27 Deepak Kumar Panda , Adolfo Perrusquia , Weisi Guo

Provably efficient Model-Based Reinforcement Learning (MBRL) based on optimism or posterior sampling (PSRL) is ensured to attain the global optimality asymptotically by introducing the complexity measure of the model. However, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-19 Shenao Zhang

Traditional portfolio management methods can incorporate specific investor preferences but rely on accurate forecasts of asset returns and covariances. Reinforcement learning (RL) methods do not rely on these explicit forecasts and are…

Portfolio Management · Quantitative Finance 2022-03-23 Ruan Pretorius , Terence van Zyl

We consider the problem of finding optimal policies for a Markov Decision Process with almost sure constraints on state transitions and action triplets. We define value and action-value functions that satisfy a barrier-based decomposition…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-25 Agustin Castellano , Juan Bazerque , Enrique Mallada