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Safe exploration presents a major challenge in reinforcement learning (RL): when active data collection requires deploying partially trained policies, we must ensure that these policies avoid catastrophically unsafe regions, while still…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-27 Homanga Bharadhwaj , Aviral Kumar , Nicholas Rhinehart , Sergey Levine , Florian Shkurti , Animesh Garg

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has demonstrated remarkable performance in many continuous control tasks. However, a significant obstacle to the real-world application of DRL is the lack of safety guarantees. Although DRL agents can…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-08-15 Weiye Zhao , Feihan Li , Changliu Liu

The ability to learn and execute optimal control policies safely is critical to realization of complex autonomy, especially where task restarts are not available and/or the systems are safety-critical. Safety requirements are often…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-10-06 S M Nahid Mahmud , Moad Abudia , Scott A Nivison , Zachary I. Bell , Rushikesh Kamalapurkar

Offline reinforcement learning has become one of the most practical RL settings. However, most existing works on offline RL focus on the standard setting with scalar reward feedback. It remains unknown how to universally transfer the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-25 Yinglun Xu , David Zhu , Rohan Gumaste , Gagandeep Singh

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) often leverage Reinforcement Learning (RL) techniques to adapt dynamically to changing environments and optimize performance. However, it is challenging to construct safety cases for RL components. We therefore…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-03-13 Katherine Dearstyne , Pedro , Alarcon Granadeno , Theodore Chambers , Jane Cleland-Huang

The increasing use of autonomous and semi-autonomous agents in society has made it crucial to validate their safety. However, the complex scenarios in which they are used may make formal verification impossible. To address this challenge,…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-03-03 Jared J. Beard , Ali Baheri

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

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…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-11-22 Mahmoud Selim , Amr Alanwar , Shreyas Kousik , Grace Gao , Marco Pavone , Karl H. Johansson

The large-scale integration of intermittent renewable energy resources introduces increased uncertainty and volatility to the supply side of power systems, thereby complicating system operation and control. Recently, data-driven approaches,…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-07-02 Peipei Yu , Zhenyi Wang , Hongcai Zhang , Yonghua Song

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has achieved impressive performance in robotics and autonomous systems (RAS). A key challenge to its deployment in real-life operations is the presence of spuriously unsafe DRL policies. Unexplored states…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-01-31 Yi Dong , Xingyu Zhao , Sen Wang , Xiaowei Huang

Optimal control strategies are often combined with safety certificates to ensure both performance and safety in safety-critical systems. A prominent example is combining Model Predictive Control (MPC) with Control Barrier Functions (CBF).…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-12-05 Kerim Dzhumageldyev , Filippo Airaldi , Azita Dabiri

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-17 Garrett Thomas , Yuping Luo , Tengyu Ma

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

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) with assured satisfaction of hard state constraints during training has recently received a lot of attention. Safety filters, e.g., based on control barrier functions (CBFs), provide a promising way for safe…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-08-30 Yikun Cheng , Pan Zhao , Naira Hovakimyan

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

Offline safe reinforcement learning (RL) is increasingly important for cyber-physical systems (CPS), where safety violations during training are unacceptable and only pre-collected data are available. Existing offline safe RL methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-12 Hsin-Jung Yang , Zhanhong Jiang , Prajwal Koirala , Qisai Liu , Cody Fleming , Soumik Sarkar

Safe exploration is a challenging and important problem in model-free reinforcement learning (RL). Often the safety cost is sparse and unknown, which unavoidably leads to constraint violations -- a phenomenon ideally to be avoided in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-13 Aivar Sootla , Alexander I. Cowen-Rivers , Jun Wang , Haitham Bou Ammar

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising optimal control technique for multi-energy management systems. It does not require a model a priori - reducing the upfront and ongoing project-specific engineering effort and is capable of learning…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-09-02 Glenn Ceusters , Luis Ramirez Camargo , Rüdiger Franke , Ann Nowé , Maarten Messagie

Vanilla Reinforcement Learning (RL) can efficiently solve complex tasks but does not provide any guarantees on system behavior. To bridge this gap, we propose a three-step safe RL procedure for continuous action spaces that provides…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-09-29 Hanna Krasowski , Prithvi Akella , Aaron D. Ames , Matthias Althoff

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a powerful method for controlling dynamic systems, but its learning mechanism can lead to unpredictable actions that undermine the safety of critical systems. Here, we propose RL with Adaptive Regularization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-01 Haozhe Tian , Homayoun Hamedmoghadam , Robert Shorten , Pietro Ferraro