Related papers: Provably Safe Reinforcement Learning via Action Pr…
For all its successes, Reinforcement Learning (RL) still struggles to deliver formal guarantees on the closed-loop behavior of the learned policy. Among other things, guaranteeing the safety of RL with respect to safety-critical systems is…
Safe exploration is a common problem in reinforcement learning (RL) that aims to prevent agents from making disastrous decisions while exploring their environment. A family of approaches to this problem assume domain knowledge in the form…
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…
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…
Even though neural networks are being increasingly deployed in safety-critical control applications, it remains difficult to enforce constraints on their output, meaning that it is hard to guarantee safety in such settings. While many…
Reinforcement learning algorithms discover policies that maximize reward, but do not necessarily guarantee safety during learning or execution phases. We introduce a new approach to learn optimal policies while enforcing properties…
Designing Reinforcement Learning (RL) solutions for real-life problems remains a significant challenge. A major area of concern is safety. "Shielding" is a popular technique to enforce safety in RL by turning user-defined safety…
While Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has achieved remarkable success across various domains, it remains vulnerable to occasional catastrophic failures without additional safeguards. An effective solution to prevent these failures is to…
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:…
Obtaining safety guarantees for reinforcement learning is a major challenge to achieve applicability for real-world tasks. Safety shields extend standard reinforcement learning and achieve hard safety guarantees. However, existing safety…
This paper targets the efficient construction of a safety shield for decision making in scenarios that incorporate uncertainty. Markov decision processes (MDPs) are prominent models to capture such planning problems. Reinforcement learning…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been shown to be effective in many scenarios. However, it typically requires the exploration of a sufficiently large number of state-action pairs, some of which may be unsafe. Consequently, its application to…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is capable of sophisticated motion planning and control for robots in uncertain environments. However, state-of-the-art deep RL approaches typically lack safety guarantees, especially when the robot and…
Ensuring the safety of reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms is crucial to unlock their potential for many real-world tasks. However, vanilla RL and most safe RL approaches do not guarantee safety. In recent years, several methods have…
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…
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…
It is challenging to use reinforcement learning (RL) in cyber-physical systems due to the lack of safety guarantees during learning. Although there have been various proposals to reduce undesired behaviors during learning, most of these…
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…
Deep reinforcement learning (RL) has shown promising results in the motion planning of manipulators. However, no method guarantees the safety of highly dynamic obstacles, such as humans, in RL-based manipulator control. This lack of formal…
Integrating learning-based techniques, especially reinforcement learning, into robotics is promising for solving complex problems in unstructured environments. However, most existing approaches are trained in well-tuned simulators and…