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Achieving sample efficiency in online episodic reinforcement learning (RL) requires optimally balancing exploration and exploitation. When it comes to a finite-horizon episodic Markov decision process with $S$ states, $A$ actions and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-18 Gen Li , Laixi Shi , Yuxin Chen , Yuejie Chi

Offline safe reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising approach for learning safe behaviors without engaging in risky online interactions with the environment. Most existing methods in offline safe RL rely on cost constraints…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-22 Ze Gong , Akshat Kumar , Pradeep Varakantham

We consider primal-dual-based reinforcement learning (RL) in episodic constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs) with non-stationary objectives and constraints, which plays a central role in ensuring the safety of RL in time-varying…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-22 Yuhao Ding , Javad Lavaei

Control tasks with safety requirements under high levels of model uncertainty are increasingly common. Machine learning techniques are frequently used to address such tasks, typically by leveraging model error bounds to specify robust…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-06-13 Alexandre Capone , Ryan Cosner , Aaaron Ames , Sandra Hirche

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) provides a compelling paradigm for training autonomous systems without the risks of online exploration, particularly in safety-critical domains. However, jointly achieving strong safety and performance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Manan Tayal , Mumuksh Tayal

Offline safe reinforcement learning (RL) seeks reward-maximizing policies from static datasets under strict safety constraints. Existing methods often rely on soft expected-cost objectives or iterative generative inference, which can be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Mumuksh Tayal , Manan Tayal , Ravi Prakash

To provide rigorous uncertainty quantification for online learning models, we develop a framework for constructing uncertainty sets that provably control risk -- such as coverage of confidence intervals, false negative rate, or F1 score --…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-30 Shai Feldman , Liran Ringel , Stephen Bates , Yaniv Romano

This work develops a robust adaptive control strategy for discrete-time systems using Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) to ensure safety under parametric model uncertainty and disturbances. A key contribution of this work is establishing a…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-02-05 Changrui Liu , Anil Alan , Shengling Shi , Bart De Schutter

Reinforcement learning (RL) can improve control performance by seeking to learn optimal control policies in the end-use environment for vehicles and other systems. To accomplish this, RL algorithms need to sufficiently explore the state and…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-05-21 Habtamu Hailemichael , Beshah Ayalew , Andrej Ivanco

Path-tracking control of self-driving vehicles can benefit from deep learning for tackling longstanding challenges such as nonlinearity and uncertainty. However, deep neural controllers lack safety guarantees, restricting their practical…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-08-09 Zhizhen Qin , Tsui-Wei Weng , Sicun Gao

This paper concerns the central issues of model robustness and sample efficiency in offline reinforcement learning (RL), which aims to learn to perform decision making from history data without active exploration. Due to uncertainties and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-01 Laixi Shi , Yuejie Chi

We consider the problem of learning the optimal policy for Markov decision processes with safety constraints. We formulate the problem in a reach-avoid setup. Our goal is to design online reinforcement learning algorithms that ensure safety…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Abhijit Mazumdar , Rafal Wisniewski , Manuela L. Bujorianu

In the field of safe reinforcement learning (RL), finding a balance between satisfying safety constraints and optimizing reward performance presents a significant challenge. A key obstacle in this endeavor is the estimation of safety…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-14 Zhepeng Cen , Yihang Yao , Zuxin Liu , Ding Zhao

The large-scale integration of intermittent renewable energy resources introduces increased uncertainty and volatility to the supply side of power systems, thereby complicating system operation and control. Recently, data-driven approaches,…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-07-02 Peipei Yu , Zhenyi Wang , Hongcai Zhang , Yonghua Song

In this paper, we leverage ideas from model-based control to address the sample efficiency problem of reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. Accelerating learning is an active field of RL highly relevant in the context of time-varying…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-05-23 Ibrahim Ahmed , Marcos Quinones-Grueiro , Gautam Biswas

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a control approach that can handle nonlinear stochastic optimal control problems. However, despite the promise exhibited, RL has yet to see marked translation to industrial practice primarily due to its…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-15 Elton Pan , Panagiotis Petsagkourakis , Max Mowbray , Dongda Zhang , Antonio del Rio-Chanona

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) is crucial for deploying RL agents in real-world applications, as it aims to maximize long-term rewards while satisfying safety constraints. However, safe RL often suffers from sample inefficiency, requiring…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-03 Shangding Gu , Laixi Shi , Yuhao Ding , Alois Knoll , Costas Spanos , Adam Wierman , Ming Jin

Continuous-time reinforcement learning (CTRL) provides a principled framework for sequential decision-making in environments where interactions evolve continuously over time. Despite its empirical success, the theoretical understanding of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Runze Zhao , Yue Yu , Adams Yiyue Zhu , Chen Yang , Dongruo Zhou

We study the sample complexity of online reinforcement learning in the general \hzyrev{non-episodic} setting of nonlinear dynamical systems with continuous state and action spaces. Our analysis accommodates a large class of dynamical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Michael Muehlebach , Zhiyu He , Michael I. Jordan

The recent success of reinforcement learning's (RL) in solving complex tasks is most often attributed to its capacity to explore and exploit an environment where it has been trained. Sample efficiency is usually not an issue since cheap…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-03-16 Govardana Sachithanandam Ramachandran , Kazuma Hashimoto , Caiming Xiong