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Safe reinforcement learning aims to learn the optimal policy while satisfying safety constraints, which is essential in real-world applications. However, current algorithms still struggle for efficient policy updates with hard constraint…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-20 Linrui Zhang , Li Shen , Long Yang , Shixiang Chen , Bo Yuan , Xueqian Wang , Dacheng Tao

Sequential decision making using Markov Decision Process underpins many realworld applications. Both model-based and model free methods have achieved strong results in these settings. However, real-world tasks must balance reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-01 Janaka Chathuranga Brahmanage , Akshat Kumar

The primary goal of reinforcement learning is to develop decision-making policies that prioritize optimal performance, frequently without considering safety. In contrast, safe reinforcement learning seeks to reduce or avoid unsafe behavior.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Zahra Shahrooei , Ali Baheri

We study the problem of off-policy evaluation for slate bandits, for the typical case in which the logging policy factorizes over the slots of the slate. We slightly depart from the existing literature by taking Bayes risk as the criterion…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-08 Nikos Vlassis , Fernando Amat Gil , Ashok Chandrashekar

Pure exploration in episodic Reinforcement Learning has primarily focused on Best Policy Identification (BPI), which seeks to identify a (near)-optimal policy with high confidence. Motivated by practical settings where a ``good enough''…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Zitian Li , Wang Chi Cheung

Reinforcement learning is a promising approach to synthesizing policies for challenging robotics tasks. A key problem is how to ensure safety of the learned policy---e.g., that a walking robot does not fall over or that an autonomous car…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-22 Osbert Bastani

Safety is a primary concern when applying reinforcement learning to real-world control tasks, especially in the presence of external disturbances. However, existing safe reinforcement learning algorithms rarely account for external…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-12 Zeyang Li , Chuxiong Hu , Shengbo Eben Li , Jia Cheng , Yunan Wang

In real-life scenarios, a Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent aiming to maximise their reward, must often also behave in a safe manner, including at training time. Thus, much attention in recent years has been given to Safe RL, where an agent…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-03-26 Edwin Hamel-De le Court , Francesco Belardinelli , Alexander W. Goodall

Offline Preference-based Reinforcement Learning (PbRL) learns rewards and policies aligned with human preferences without the need for extensive reward engineering and direct interaction with human annotators. However, ensuring safety…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-24 Ze Gong , Pradeep Varakantham , Akshat Kumar

Safe Reinforcement Learning (Safe RL) aims to train an RL agent to maximize its performance in real-world environments while adhering to safety constraints, as exceeding safety violation limits can result in severe consequences. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-07 Hanping Zhang , Yuhong Guo

We propose a provable defense mechanism against backdoor policies in reinforcement learning under subspace trigger assumption. A backdoor policy is a security threat where an adversary publishes a seemingly well-behaved policy which in fact…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-22 Shubham Kumar Bharti , Xuezhou Zhang , Adish Singla , Xiaojin Zhu

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

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems possess significant potential to drive societal progress. However, their deployment often faces obstacles due to substantial safety concerns. Safe reinforcement learning (SafeRL) emerges as a solution to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-10-08 Jiaming Ji , Borong Zhang , Jiayi Zhou , Xuehai Pan , Weidong Huang , Ruiyang Sun , Yiran Geng , Yifan Zhong , Juntao Dai , Yaodong Yang

In this paper, we study the learning of safe policies in the setting of reinforcement learning problems. This is, we aim to control a Markov Decision Process (MDP) of which we do not know the transition probabilities, but we have access to…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-01-14 Santiago Paternain , Miguel Calvo-Fullana , Luiz F. O. Chamon , Alejandro Ribeiro

Context: Demonstrating high reliability and safety for safety-critical systems (SCSs) remains a hard problem. Diverse evidence needs to be combined in a rigorous way: in particular, results of operational testing with other evidence from…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-08-24 Xingyu Zhao , Kizito Salako , Lorenzo Strigini , Valentin Robu , David Flynn

We study the problem of offline policy optimization in stochastic contextual bandit problems, where the goal is to learn a near-optimal policy based on a dataset of decision data collected by a suboptimal behavior policy. Rather than making…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-28 Germano Gabbianelli , Gergely Neu , Matteo Papini

One of the fundamental challenges for offline reinforcement learning (RL) is ensuring robustness to data distribution. Whether the data originates from a near-optimal policy or not, we anticipate that an algorithm should demonstrate its…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-18 Xiaohan Hu , Yi Ma , Chenjun Xiao , Yan Zheng , Jianye Hao

Safety is a critical feature of controller design for physical systems. When designing control policies, several approaches to guarantee this aspect of autonomy have been proposed, such as robust controllers or control barrier functions.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-26 Miguel Calvo-Fullana , Luiz F. O. Chamon , Santiago Paternain

Model-based algorithms, which learn a dynamics model from logged experience and perform some sort of pessimistic planning under the learned model, have emerged as a promising paradigm for offline reinforcement learning (offline RL).…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-28 Tianhe Yu , Aviral Kumar , Rafael Rafailov , Aravind Rajeswaran , Sergey Levine , Chelsea Finn

This paper considers the problem of learning safe policies in the context of reinforcement learning (RL). In particular, we consider the notion of probabilistic safety. This is, we aim to design policies that maintain the state of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-20 Weiqin Chen , Dharmashankar Subramanian , Santiago Paternain