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Safety is a crucial property of every robotic platform: any control policy should always comply with actuator limits and avoid collisions with the environment and humans. In reinforcement learning, safety is even more fundamental for…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-03-02 Puze Liu , Kuo Zhang , Davide Tateo , Snehal Jauhri , Zhiyuan Hu , Jan Peters , Georgia Chalvatzaki

Reinforcement learning provides an appealing framework for robotic control due to its ability to learn expressive policies purely through real-world interaction. However, this requires addressing real-world constraints and avoiding…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-05-09 Kyle Stachowicz , Sergey Levine

Reinforcement learning is a powerful paradigm for learning optimal policies from experimental data. However, to find optimal policies, most reinforcement learning algorithms explore all possible actions, which may be harmful for real-world…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-11-15 Felix Berkenkamp , Matteo Turchetta , Angela P. Schoellig , Andreas Krause

Agents' learning from feedback shapes economic outcomes, and many economic decision-makers today employ learning algorithms to make consequential choices. This note shows that a widely used learning algorithm, $\varepsilon$-Greedy, exhibits…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-13 Andreas Haupt , Aroon Narayanan

Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents have great successes in solving tasks with large observation and action spaces from limited feedback. Still, training the agents is data-intensive and there are no guarantees that the learned behavior is…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-10-20 Helge Spieker

Many currently deployed Reinforcement Learning agents work in an environment shared with humans, be them co-workers, users or clients. It is desirable that these agents adjust to people's preferences, learn faster thanks to their help, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-08-14 Hélène Plisnier , Denis Steckelmacher , Tim Brys , Diederik M. Roijers , Ann Nowé

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

Safety-critical robot systems need thorough testing to expose design flaws and software bugs which could endanger humans. Testing in simulation is becoming increasingly popular, as it can be applied early in the development process and does…

There have been numerous advances in reinforcement learning, but the typically unconstrained exploration of the learning process prevents the adoption of these methods in many safety critical applications. Recent work in safe reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-02 David Isele , Alireza Nakhaei , Kikuo Fujimura

An important problem in reinforcement learning is designing agents that learn to solve tasks safely in an environment. A common solution is for a human expert to define either a penalty in the reward function or a cost to be minimised when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-02 Geraud Nangue Tasse , Tamlin Love , Mark Nemecek , Steven James , Benjamin Rosman

Reinforcement learning (RL) methods for social robot navigation show great success navigating robots through large crowds of people, but the performance of these learning-based methods tends to degrade in particularly challenging or…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-08-14 Sara Pohland , Alvin Tan , Prabal Dutta , Claire Tomlin

Safe navigation is essential for autonomous systems operating in hazardous environments. Traditional planning methods excel at long-horizon tasks but rely on a predefined graph with fixed distance metrics. In contrast, safe Reinforcement…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-09-12 Meng Feng , Viraj Parimi , Brian Williams

A key challenge in the field of reinforcement learning is to develop agents that behave cautiously in novel situations. It is generally impossible to anticipate all situations that an autonomous system may face or what behavior would best…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Montaser Mohammedalamen , Dustin Morrill , Alexander Sieusahai , Yash Satsangi , Michael Bowling

Reinforcement learning can enable complex, adaptive behavior to be learned automatically for autonomous robotic platforms. However, practical deployment of reinforcement learning methods must contend with the fact that the training process…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-02-07 Gregory Kahn , Adam Villaflor , Vitchyr Pong , Pieter Abbeel , Sergey Levine

Reinforcement learning is a widely used approach to autonomous navigation, showing potential in various tasks and robotic setups. Still, it often struggles to reach distant goals when safety constraints are imposed (e.g., the wheeled robot…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-08-27 Brian Angulo , Gregory Gorbov , Aleksandr Panov , Konstantin Yakovlev

In the last decade, reinforcement learning successfully solved complex control tasks and decision-making problems, like the Go board game. Yet, there are few success stories when it comes to deploying those algorithms to real-world…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-09-13 Giuseppe Paolo , Jonas Gonzalez-Billandon , Albert Thomas , Balázs Kégl

We study a security threat to reinforcement learning where an attacker poisons the learning environment to force the agent into executing a target policy chosen by the attacker. As a victim, we consider RL agents whose objective is to find…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-20 Amin Rakhsha , Goran Radanovic , Rati Devidze , Xiaojin Zhu , Adish Singla

Reinforcement learning algorithms describe how an agent can learn an optimal action policy in a sequential decision process, through repeated experience. In a given environment, the agent policy provides him some running and terminal…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2020-03-24 Arthur Charpentier , Romuald Elie , Carl Remlinger

Autonomous agents trained via reinforcement learning present numerous safety concerns: reward hacking, negative side effects, and unsafe exploration, among others. In the context of near-future autonomous agents, operating in environments…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-02-20 Christopher Frye , Ilya Feige

The primary goal of reinforcement learning is to develop decision-making policies that prioritize optimal performance, frequently without considering safety. In contrast, safe reinforcement learning seeks to reduce or avoid unsafe behavior.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Zahra Shahrooei , Ali Baheri