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Reinforcement learning is a framework for learning to act sequentially in an unknown environment. We propose a natural approach for modeling policy structure in policy gradients. The key idea is to optimize for a subset of future rewards:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-09 Puneet Mathur , Branislav Kveton , Subhojyoti Mukherjee , Viet Dac Lai

Many physical systems have underlying safety considerations that require that the policy employed ensures the satisfaction of a set of constraints. The analytical formulation usually takes the form of a Constrained Markov Decision Process…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-03 Aria HasanzadeZonuzy , Archana Bura , Dileep Kalathil , Srinivas Shakkottai

Policy optimization is a core component of reinforcement learning (RL), and most existing RL methods directly optimize parameters of a policy based on maximizing the expected total reward, or its surrogate. Though often achieving…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-08-10 Ruiyi Zhang , Changyou Chen , Chunyuan Li , Lawrence Carin

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

Risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RL) is crucial for maintaining reliable performance in high-stakes applications. While traditional RL methods aim to learn a point estimate of the random cumulative cost, distributional RL (DRL) seeks…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-03 Minheng Xiao , Xian Yu , Lei Ying

Online safe reinforcement learning (RL) involves training a policy that maximizes task efficiency while satisfying constraints via interacting with the environments. In this paper, our focus lies in addressing the complex challenges…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-27 Yihang Yao , Zuxin Liu , Zhepeng Cen , Peide Huang , Tingnan Zhang , Wenhao Yu , Ding Zhao

Policy gradient methods have been frequently applied to problems in control and reinforcement learning with great success, yet existing convergence analysis still relies on non-intuitive, impractical and often opaque conditions. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-08 Matthew S. Zhang , Murat A. Erdogdu , Animesh Garg

For many applications of reinforcement learning it can be more convenient to specify both a reward function and constraints, rather than trying to design behavior through the reward function. For example, systems that physically interact…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-05-31 Joshua Achiam , David Held , Aviv Tamar , Pieter Abbeel

In this work we introduce reinforcement learning techniques for solving lexicographic multi-objective problems. These are problems that involve multiple reward signals, and where the goal is to learn a policy that maximises the first reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-29 Joar Skalse , Lewis Hammond , Charlie Griffin , Alessandro Abate

We present a methodology to deploy the stochastic policy gradient method, using actor-critic techniques, when the optimal policy is approximated using a parametric optimization problem, allowing one to enforce safety via hard constraints.…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-09-23 Sebastien Gros , Mario Zanon

While reinforcement learning algorithms have had great success in the field of autonomous navigation, they cannot be straightforwardly applied to the real autonomous systems without considering the safety constraints. The later are crucial…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-07-28 Brian Angulo , Gregory Gorbov , Aleksandr Panov , Konstantin Yakovlev

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown exceptional performance across various applications, enabling autonomous agents to learn optimal policies through interaction with their environments. However, traditional RL frameworks often face…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Rui Liu , Anish Gupta , Erfaun Noorani , Pratap Tokekar

Policy Gradient (PG) algorithms are among the best candidates for the much-anticipated applications of reinforcement learning to real-world control tasks, such as robotics. However, the trial-and-error nature of these methods poses safety…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-20 Matteo Papini , Matteo Pirotta , Marcello Restelli

Reinforcement learning (RL) has revolutionized decision-making across a wide range of domains over the past few decades. Yet, deploying RL policies in real-world scenarios presents the crucial challenge of ensuring safety. Traditional safe…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-03-26 Lunet Yifru , Ali Baheri

Reinforcement learning algorithms typically necessitate extensive exploration of the state space to find optimal policies. However, in safety-critical applications, the risks associated with such exploration can lead to catastrophic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-28 Kaustubh Mani , Vincent Mai , Charlie Gauthier , Annie Chen , Samer Nashed , Liam Paull

Policy gradient methods hold great potential for solving complex continuous control tasks. Still, their training efficiency can be improved by exploiting structure within the optimization problem. Recent work indicates that supervised…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-19 Jan Schneider , Pierre Schumacher , Simon Guist , Le Chen , Daniel Häufle , Bernhard Schölkopf , Dieter Büchler

This paper examines reinforcement learning (RL) in infinite-horizon decision processes with almost-sure safety constraints, crucial for applications like autonomous systems, finance, and resource management. We propose a doubly-regularized…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-17 Pekka Malo , Lauri Viitasaari , Antti Suominen , Eeva Vilkkumaa , Olli Tahvonen

In this paper, we present a methodology to deploy the deterministic policy gradient method, using actor-critic techniques, when the optimal policy is approximated using a parametric optimization problem, where safety is enforced via hard…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-09-23 Sebastien Gros , Mario Zanon

We propose policy gradient algorithms which learn risk-sensitive policies in a reinforcement learning (RL) framework. Our proposed algorithms maximize the distortion risk measure (DRM) of the cumulative reward in an episodic Markov decision…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-06 Nithia Vijayan , Prashanth L. A

The applicability of reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms in real-world domains often requires adherence to safety constraints, a need difficult to address given the asymptotic nature of the classic RL optimization objective. In contrast…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-15 Moritz A. Zanger , Karam Daaboul , J. Marius Zöllner