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Understanding how to efficiently learn while adhering to safety constraints is essential for using online reinforcement learning in practical applications. However, proving rigorous regret bounds for safety-constrained reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-04-29 Benjamin Schiffer , Lucas Janson

There have been numerous advances in reinforcement learning, but the typically unconstrained exploration of the learning process prevents the adoption of these methods in many safety critical applications. Recent work in safe reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-02 David Isele , Alireza Nakhaei , Kikuo Fujimura

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

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

Control barrier functions are mathematical constructs used to guarantee safety for robotic systems. When integrated as constraints in a quadratic programming optimization problem, instantaneous control synthesis with real-time performance…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-03-12 Mohit Srinivasan , Amogh Dabholkar , Samuel Coogan , Patricio Vela

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

Machine teaching can be viewed as optimal control for learning. Given a learner's model, machine teaching aims to determine the optimal training data to steer the learner towards a target hypothesis. In this paper, we are interested in…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2019-08-06 Mohamadreza Ahmadi , Bo Wu , Yuxin Chen , Yisong Yue , Ufuk Topcu

Tolerance estimation problems are prevailing in engineering applications. For example, in modern robotics, it remains challenging to efficiently estimate joint tolerance, \ie the maximal allowable deviation from a reference robot state such…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-04-20 Weiye Zhao , Suqin He , Changliu Liu

Deep reinforcement learning enables algorithms to learn complex behavior, deal with continuous action spaces and find good strategies in environments with high dimensional state spaces. With deep reinforcement learning being an active area…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-17 Winfried Lötzsch

Recent advances in Deep Machine Learning have shown promise in solving complex perception and control loops via methods such as reinforcement and imitation learning. However, guaranteeing safety for such learned deep policies has been a…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-03-03 Tom Hirshberg , Sai Vemprala , Ashish Kapoor

The safety of training task policies and their subsequent application using reinforcement learning (RL) methods has become a focal point in the field of safe RL. A central challenge in this area remains the establishment of theoretical…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-05-02 Chenggang Wang , Xinyi Wang , Yutong Dong , Lei Song , Xinping Guan

Control systems often need to satisfy strict safety requirements. Safety index provides a handy way to evaluate the safety level of the system and derive the resulting safe control policies. However, designing safety index functions under…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-10-05 Weiye Zhao , Tairan He , Tianhao Wei , Simin Liu , Changliu Liu

Reinforcement Learning (RL) uses rewards to guide learning, yet reward design is typically hand-crafted using heuristics that can be difficult to tune. We propose a Control Barrier Function (CBF)-informed reward design for Multi-Agent RL…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Jianye Xu , Bassam Alrifaee

Quadratic programming is a workhorse of modern nonlinear optimization, control, and data science. Although regularized methods offer convergence guarantees under minimal assumptions on the problem data, they can exhibit the slow…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-18 Jeremy Bertoncini , Alberto De Marchi , Matthias Gerdts , Simon Gottschalk

Guaranteeing safe behaviour of reinforcement learning (RL) policies poses significant challenges for safety-critical applications, despite RL's generality and scalability. To address this, we propose a new approach to apply verification…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-06 Daniel C. H. Tan , Fernando Acero , Robert McCarthy , Dimitrios Kanoulas , Zhibin Li

While reinforcement learning algorithms have had great success in the field of autonomous navigation, they cannot be straightforwardly applied to the real autonomous systems without considering the safety constraints. The later are crucial…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-07-28 Brian Angulo , Gregory Gorbov , Aleksandr Panov , Konstantin Yakovlev

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

While learning-based control techniques often outperform classical controller designs, safety requirements limit the acceptance of such methods in many applications. Recent developments address this issue through so-called predictive safety…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-05-16 Kim P. Wabersich , Melanie N. Zeilinger

Traffic signal control is safety-critical for our daily life. Roughly one-quarter of road accidents in the U.S. happen at intersections due to problematic signal timing, urging the development of safety-oriented intersection control.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-01 Wenlu Du , Junyi Ye , Jingyi Gu , Jing Li , Hua Wei , Guiling Wang

Reinforcement learning algorithms are generally designed to maximize the expected return across a population. However, a policy that is optimal on average may be suboptimal for certain individuals, leading to potential safety concerns. To…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-26 Jingyi Li , Peng Wu , Chengchun Shi