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Related papers: Safe Policy Improvement Approaches and their Limit…

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A longstanding goal in safe reinforcement learning (RL) is a method to ensure the safety of a policy throughout the entire process, from learning to operation. However, existing safe RL paradigms inherently struggle to achieve this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Akifumi Wachi , Kohei Miyaguchi , Takumi Tanabe , Rei Sato , Youhei Akimoto

In this paper, we consider the problem of learning safe policies for probabilistic-constrained reinforcement learning (RL). Specifically, a safe policy or controller is one that, with high probability, maintains the trajectory of the agent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-14 Weiqin Chen , Dharmashankar Subramanian , Santiago Paternain

Safety assurance is a critical yet challenging aspect when developing self-driving technologies. Hamilton-Jacobi backward-reachability analysis is a formal verification tool for verifying the safety of dynamic systems in the presence of…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-06-08 Ran Tian , Anjian Li , Masayoshi Tomizuka , Liting Sun

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has achieved remarkable success in sequential decision tasks. However, recent studies have revealed the vulnerability of RL policies to different perturbations, raising concerns about their effectiveness and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Buqing Nie , Yangqing Fu , Jingtian Ji , Yue Gao

Policy optimization is among the most popular and successful reinforcement learning algorithms, and there is increasing interest in understanding its theoretical guarantees. In this work, we initiate the study of policy optimization for the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-08 Liyu Chen , Haipeng Luo , Aviv Rosenberg

Safe learning and optimization deals with learning and optimization problems that avoid, as much as possible, the evaluation of non-safe input points, which are solutions, policies, or strategies that cause an irrecoverable loss (e.g.,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-25 Youngmin Kim , Richard Allmendinger , Manuel López-Ibáñez

In order for reinforcement learning techniques to be useful in real-world decision making processes, they must be able to produce robust performance from limited data. Deep policy optimization methods have achieved impressive results on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-22 James Queeney , Ioannis Ch. Paschalidis , Christos G. Cassandras

Entropy regularization is an important idea in reinforcement learning, with great success in recent algorithms like Soft Q Network (SQN) and Soft Actor-Critic (SAC1). In this work, we extend this idea into the on-policy realm. We propose…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-19 Jingbin Liu , Xinyang Gu , Shuai Liu

The increasing adoption of Reinforcement Learning in safety-critical systems domains such as autonomous vehicles, health, and aviation raises the need for ensuring their safety. Existing safety mechanisms such as adversarial training,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-11 Paulina Stevia Nouwou Mindom , Amin Nikanjam , Foutse Khomh , John Mullins

Despite success in many challenging problems, reinforcement learning (RL) is still confronted with sample inefficiency, which can be mitigated by introducing prior knowledge to agents. However, many transfer techniques in reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-21 Matheus Centa , Philippe Preux

Safe decision-making algorithms for control of mobile robots often require the existence of feedback to verify the safety of proposed actions. This feedback is assumed to be directly available during the development or deployment of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Jeff Pflueger , Michael Everett

Algorithmic recommendations and decisions have become ubiquitous in today's society. Many of these data-driven policies, especially in the realm of public policy, are based on known, deterministic rules to ensure their transparency and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-04-02 Eli Ben-Michael , D. James Greiner , Kosuke Imai , Zhichao Jiang

The deployment of autonomous robots in safety-critical applications requires safety guarantees. Provably safe reinforcement learning is an active field of research that aims to provide such guarantees using safeguards. These safeguards…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Tim Walter , Hannah Markgraf , Jonathan Külz , Matthias Althoff

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

When users work with AI agents, they form conscious or subconscious expectations of them. Meeting user expectations is crucial for such agents to engage in successful interactions and teaming. However, users may form expectations of an…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-26 Akkamahadevi Hanni , Jonathan Montaño , Yu Zhang

We consider the problem of reinforcement learning when provided with (1) a baseline control policy and (2) a set of constraints that the learner must satisfy. The baseline policy can arise from demonstration data or a teacher agent and may…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-13 Tsung-Yen Yang , Justinian Rosca , Karthik Narasimhan , Peter J. Ramadge

We study automated intrusion prevention using reinforcement learning. Following a novel approach, we formulate the problem of intrusion prevention as an (optimal) multiple stopping problem. This formulation gives us insight into the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-23 Kim Hammar , Rolf Stadler

A significant portion of recent research on Large Language Model (LLM) alignment focuses on developing new policy optimization methods based on Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Two prominent directions have emerged: (i) a shift…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-27 Svetlana Glazyrina , Maksim Kryzhanovskiy , Roman Ischenko

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has become a central post-training paradigm for improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models. Yet existing methods share a common blind spot: they optimize policies…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-29 Huaiyang Wang , Xiaojie Li , Deqing Wang , Haoyi Zhou , Zixuan Huang , Yaodong Yang , Jianxin Li , Yikun Ban

Our goal is to compute a policy that guarantees improved return over a baseline policy even when the available MDP model is inaccurate. The inaccurate model may be constructed, for example, by system identification techniques when the true…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2015-06-17 Yinlam Chow , Marek Petrik , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh