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Ensuring safety is important for the practical deployment of reinforcement learning (RL). Various challenges must be addressed, such as handling stochasticity in the environments, providing rigorous guarantees of persistent state-wise…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-26 Milan Ganai , Zheng Gong , Chenning Yu , Sylvia Herbert , Sicun Gao

In safety-critical domains, reinforcement learning (RL) agents must often satisfy strict, zero-cost safety constraints while accomplishing tasks. Existing model-free methods frequently either fail to achieve near-zero safety violations or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Dominik Wagner , Ankit Kanwar , Luke Ong

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been widely applied to many control tasks and substantially improved the performances compared to conventional control methods in many domains where the reward function is well defined. However, for many…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-22 Baohe Zhang , Yuan Zhang , Lilli Frison , Thomas Brox , Joschka Bödecker

We consider the problem of finding optimal policies for a Markov Decision Process with almost sure constraints on state transitions and action triplets. We define value and action-value functions that satisfy a barrier-based decomposition…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-25 Agustin Castellano , Juan Bazerque , Enrique Mallada

Safe reinforcement learning tasks are a challenging domain despite being very common in the real world. The widely adopted CMDP model constrains the risks in expectation, which makes room for dangerous behaviors in long-tail states. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-30 Zihan Zhou , Jonathan Booher , Khashayar Rohanimanesh , Wei Liu , Aleksandr Petiushko , Animesh Garg

Safety and robustness are two desired properties for any reinforcement learning algorithm. CMDPs can handle additional safety constraints and RMDPs can perform well under model uncertainties. In this paper, we propose to unite these two…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-21 Reazul Hasan Russel , Mouhacine Benosman , Jeroen Van Baar , Radu Corcodel

Safety is a critical concern when deploying reinforcement learning agents for realistic tasks. Recently, safe reinforcement learning algorithms have been developed to optimize the agent's performance while avoiding violations of safety…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-05 Baiming Chen , Zuxin Liu , Jiacheng Zhu , Mengdi Xu , Wenhao Ding , Ding Zhao

Given the availability of more comprehensive measurement data in modern power systems, reinforcement learning (RL) has gained significant interest in operation and control. Conventional RL relies on trial-and-error interactions with the…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-07-01 Tong Su , Tong Wu , Junbo Zhao , Anna Scaglione , Le Xie

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) seeks to mitigate unsafe behaviors that arise from exploration during training by reducing constraint violations while maintaining task performance. Existing approaches typically rely on a single policy to…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Murad Dawood , Usama Ahmed Siddiquie , Shahram Khorshidi , Maren Bennewitz

Reinforcement learning (RL) approaches based on Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) are predominantly applied in the robot joint space, often relying on limited task-specific information and partial awareness of the 3D environment. In…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-09 Bingkun Huang , Yuhe Gong , Zewen Yang , Tianyu Ren , Luis Figueredo

Reinforcement learning (RL) has been successfully applied to a variety of robotics applications, where it outperforms classical methods. However, the safety aspect of RL and the transfer to the real world remain an open challenge. A…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-04-21 Murad Dawood , Ahmed Shokry , Maren Bennewitz

Safe reinforcement learning (Safe RL) aims to ensure policy performance while satisfying safety constraints. However, most existing Safe RL methods assume benign environments, making them vulnerable to adversarial perturbations commonly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-19 Jialiang Fan , Shixiong Jiang , Mengyu Liu , Fanxin Kong

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

Safety remains a central obstacle preventing widespread use of RL in the real world: learning new tasks in uncertain environments requires extensive exploration, but safety requires limiting exploration. We propose Recovery RL, an algorithm…

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

Safety is a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), particularly in real-world applications such as autonomous driving, robotics, and healthcare. To address this, Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs) are commonly used…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-18 Chang Liu , Yunfan Li , Lin F. Yang

Several works have addressed the problem of incorporating constraints in the reinforcement learning (RL) framework, however majority of them can only guarantee the satisfaction of soft constraints. In this work, we address the problem of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-16 Kwangyeon Kim , Akshita Gupta , Hong-Cheol Choi , Inseok Hwang

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

This paper addresses the problem of maintaining safety during training in Reinforcement Learning (RL), such that the safety constraint violations are bounded at any point during learning. In a variety of RL applications the safety of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-19 Rohan Mitta , Hosein Hasanbeig , Jun Wang , Daniel Kroening , Yiannis Kantaros , Alessandro Abate

Ensuring safety for black-box hybrid dynamical systems presents significant challenges due to their instantaneous state jumps and unknown explicit nonlinear dynamics. Existing solutions for strict safety constraint satisfaction, like…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-04-27 Aayushi Shrivastava , Kartik Nagpal , Sairam Jinkala , Jean-Baptiste Bouvier , Negar Mehr