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Related papers: Provably Safe Reinforcement Learning via Action Pr…

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One of the key challenges to deep reinforcement learning (deep RL) is to ensure safety at both training and testing phases. In this work, we propose a novel technique of unsupervised action planning to improve the safety of on-policy…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-09-30 Hao-Lun Hsu , Qiuhua Huang , Sehoon Ha

Designing control policies for legged locomotion is complex due to the under-actuated and non-continuous robot dynamics. Model-free reinforcement learning provides promising tools to tackle this challenge. However, a major bottleneck of…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-03-08 Tsung-Yen Yang , Tingnan Zhang , Linda Luu , Sehoon Ha , Jie Tan , Wenhao Yu

In offline reinforcement learning (RL), we learn policies from fixed datasets without environment interaction. The major challenges are to provide guarantees on the (1) performance and (2) safety of the resulting policy. A technique called…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Maris F. L. Galesloot , Thomas Rhemrev , Nils Jansen

Safety in reinforcement learning is often specified through cumulative cost constraints, but these trajectory-level guarantees do not directly prevent unsafe individual decisions, especially under nonstationarity. In continual and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Timofey Tomashevskiy

Reinforcement learning policies are typically represented by black-box neural networks, which are non-interpretable and not well-suited for safety-critical domains. To address both of these issues, we propose constrained normalizing flow…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-03 Finn Rietz , Erik Schaffernicht , Stefan Heinrich , Johannes A. Stork

The increasing adoption of Reinforcement Learning in safety-critical systems domains such as autonomous vehicles, health, and aviation raises the need for ensuring their safety. Existing safety mechanisms such as adversarial training,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-11 Paulina Stevia Nouwou Mindom , Amin Nikanjam , Foutse Khomh , John Mullins

This paper focuses on finding reinforcement learning policies for control systems with hard state and action constraints. Despite its success in many domains, reinforcement learning is challenging to apply to problems with hard constraints,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-24 Liyuan Zheng , Yuanyuan Shi , Lillian J. Ratliff , Baosen Zhang

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms can achieve state-of-the-art performance in decision-making and continuous control tasks. However, applying RL algorithms on safety-critical systems still needs to be well justified due to the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-11-22 Mahmoud Selim , Amr Alanwar , M. Watheq El-Kharashi , Hazem M. Abbas , Karl H. Johansson

Safety is still one of the major research challenges in reinforcement learning (RL). In this paper, we address the problem of how to avoid safety violations of RL agents during exploration in probabilistic and partially unknown…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-06 Martin Tappler , Stefan Pranger , Bettina Könighofer , Edi Muškardin , Roderick Bloem , Kim Larsen

In recent years, Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has emerged as an effective approach to solving real-world tasks. However, despite their successes, DRL-based policies suffer from poor reliability, which limits their deployment in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-24 Davide Corsi , Guy Amir , Andoni Rodriguez , Cesar Sanchez , Guy Katz , Roy Fox

While deep reinforcement learning techniques have recently produced considerable achievements on many decision-making problems, their use in robotics has largely been limited to simulated worlds or restricted motions, since unconstrained…

Robotics · Computer Science 2018-02-26 Tu-Hoa Pham , Giovanni De Magistris , Ryuki Tachibana

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is essentially a trial-and-error learning procedure which may cause unsafe behavior during the exploration-and-exploitation process. This hinders the application of RL to real-world control problems, especially…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-03 Yutong Li , Nan Li , H. Eric Tseng , Anouck Girard , Dimitar Filev , Ilya Kolmanovsky

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

Many sequential decision problems involve finding a policy that maximizes total reward while obeying safety constraints. Although much recent research has focused on the development of safe reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-20 Nolan Wagener , Byron Boots , Ching-An Cheng

Hybrid zonotopes generalize constrained zonotopes by introducing additional binary variables and possess some unique properties that make them convenient to represent nonconvex sets. This paper presents novel hybrid zonotope-based methods…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-07-06 Yuhao Zhang , Xiangru Xu

This paper proposes a safe reinforcement learning (RL) framework based on forward-invariance-induced action-space design. The control problem is cast as a Markov decision process, but instead of relying on runtime shielding or penalty-based…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-04-10 Chieh Tsai , Muhammad Junayed Hasan Zahed , Salim Hariri , Hossein Rastgoftar

The deployment of robots in uncontrolled environments requires them to operate robustly under previously unseen scenarios, like irregular terrain and wind conditions. Unfortunately, while rigorous safety frameworks from robust optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-11 Kai-Chieh Hsu , Duy Phuong Nguyen , Jaime Fernández Fisac

Safety comes first in many real-world applications involving autonomous agents. Despite a large number of reinforcement learning (RL) methods focusing on safety-critical tasks, there is still a lack of high-quality evaluation of those…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-13 Linrui Zhang , Qin Zhang , Li Shen , Bo Yuan , Xueqian Wang , Dacheng Tao

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

During training, reinforcement learning systems interact with the world without considering the safety of their actions. When deployed into the real world, such systems can be dangerous and cause harm to their surroundings. Often, dangerous…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-12-29 Ekaterina Nikonova , Cheng Xue , Jochen Renz