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Despite recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL), its application in safety critical domains like autonomous vehicles is still challenging. Although punishing RL agents for risky situations can help to learn safe policies, it may also…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-07-16 Danial Kamran , Tizian Engelgeh , Marvin Busch , Johannes Fischer , Christoph Stiller

In this work, we address the problem of determining reliable policies in reinforcement learning (RL), with a focus on optimization under uncertainty and the need for performance guarantees. While classical RL algorithms aim at maximizing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Nadir Farhi

In many real-world applications, safety constraints for reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are either unknown or not explicitly defined. We propose a framework that concurrently learns safety constraints and optimal RL policies in such…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-05-02 Lunet Yifru , Ali Baheri

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful data-driven control method that has been largely explored in autonomous driving tasks. However, conventional RL approaches learn control policies through trial-and-error interactions with the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-11-03 Tianyu Shi , Dong Chen , Kaian Chen , Zhaojian Li

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) trains a constraint satisfaction policy by interacting with the environment. We aim to tackle a more challenging problem: learning a safe policy from an offline dataset. We study the offline safe RL problem…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-22 Zuxin Liu , Zijian Guo , Yihang Yao , Zhepeng Cen , Wenhao Yu , Tingnan Zhang , Ding Zhao

Reinforcement learning (RL) agents need to be robust to variations in safety-critical environments. While system identification methods provide a way to infer the variation from online experience, they can fail in settings where fast…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-07 Annie Xie , Shagun Sodhani , Chelsea Finn , Joelle Pineau , Amy Zhang

This paper presents a novel approach to reinforcement learning (RL) for control systems that provides probabilistic stability guarantees using finite data. Leveraging Lyapunov's method, we propose a probabilistic stability theorem that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Minghao Han , Lixian Zhang , Chenliang Liu , Zhipeng Zhou , Jun Wang , Wei Pan

Safety is one of the biggest concerns to applying reinforcement learning (RL) to the physical world. In its core part, it is challenging to ensure RL agents persistently satisfy a hard state constraint without white-box or black-box…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-10-19 Weiye Zhao , Tairan He , Changliu Liu

Projection-based safety filters, which modify unsafe actions by mapping them to the closest safe alternative, are widely used to enforce safety constraints in reinforcement learning (RL). Two integration strategies are commonly considered:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Hannah Markgraf , Shambhuraj Sawant , Hanna Krasowski , Lukas Schäfer , Sebastien Gros , Matthias Althoff

Reinforcement learning (RL) has been widely applied in recommendation systems due to its potential in optimizing the long-term engagement of users. From the perspective of RL, recommendation can be formulated as a Markov decision process…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2023-10-26 Chengpeng Li , Zhengyi Yang , Jizhi Zhang , Jiancan Wu , Dingxian Wang , Xiangnan He , Xiang Wang

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

Techniques based on Reinforcement Learning (RL) are increasingly being used to design control policies for robotic systems. RL fundamentally relies on state-based reward functions to encode desired behavior of the robot and bad reward…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-11-11 Parv Kapoor , Anand Balakrishnan , Jyotirmoy V. Deshmukh

Reinforcement learning (RL) presents a promising framework to learn policies through environment interaction, but often requires an infeasible amount of interaction data to solve complex tasks from sparse rewards. One direction includes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-07 Stone Tao , Arth Shukla , Tse-kai Chan , Hao Su

Reinforcement learning (RL) agents need to explore their environments in order to learn optimal policies. In many environments and tasks, safety is of critical importance. The widespread use of simulators offers a number of advantages,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-03-01 Luka Kovač , Igor Farkaš

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) has been endowed with high expectations in tackling challenging manipulation tasks in an autonomous and self-directed fashion. Despite the significant strides made in the development of reinforcement…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-04-27 Zhenshan Bing , Aleksandr Mavrichev , Sicong Shen , Xiangtong Yao , Kejia Chen , Kai Huang , Alois Knoll

Many sequential decision-making problems that are currently automated, such as those in manufacturing or recommender systems, operate in an environment where there is either little uncertainty, or zero risk of catastrophe. As companies and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-04 Marc Rigter

It is quite challenging to ensure the safety of reinforcement learning (RL) agents in an unknown and stochastic environment under hard constraints that require the system state not to reach certain specified unsafe regions. Many popular…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-06-14 Yixuan Wang , Simon Sinong Zhan , Ruochen Jiao , Zhilu Wang , Wanxin Jin , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang , Chao Huang , Qi Zhu

Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved remarkable success in real-world decision-making across diverse domains, including gaming, robotics, online advertising, public health, and natural language processing. Despite these advances, a…

Applications · Statistics 2026-01-23 Asim H. Gazi , Yongyi Guo , Daiqi Gao , Ziping Xu , Kelly W. Zhang , Susan A. Murphy

Safety is an indispensable requirement for applying reinforcement learning (RL) to real problems. Although there has been a surge of safe RL algorithms proposed in recent years, most existing work typically 1) relies on receiving numeric…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-12 Akifumi Wachi , Wataru Hashimoto , Kazumune Hashimoto

We consider the problem of reinforcement learning under safety requirements, in which an agent is trained to complete a given task, typically formalized as the maximization of a reward signal over time, while concurrently avoiding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-25 Tu-Hoa Pham , Giovanni De Magistris , Don Joven Agravante , Subhajit Chaudhury , Asim Munawar , Ryuki Tachibana