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Reinforcement learning (RL) in the real world necessitates the development of procedures that enable agents to explore without causing harm to themselves or others. The most successful solutions to the problem of safe RL leverage offline…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-09 Alexander Quessy , Thomas Richardson , Sebastian East

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a framework to optimize a control policy using rewards that are revealed by the system as a response to a control action. In its standard form, RL involves a single agent that uses its policy to accomplish a…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-11-24 Juan Cervino , Juan Andres Bazerque , Miguel Calvo-Fullana , Alejandro Ribeiro

We consider the safe reinforcement learning (RL) problem of maximizing utility with extremely low constraint violation rates. Assuming no prior knowledge or pre-training of the environment safety model given a task, an agent has to learn,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-12 Haonan Yu , Wei Xu , Haichao Zhang

In constrained reinforcement learning (RL), a learning agent seeks to not only optimize the overall reward but also satisfy the additional safety, diversity, or budget constraints. Consequently, existing constrained RL solutions require…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-13 Sobhan Miryoosefi , Chi Jin

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising paradigm in complex and continuous robotic tasks, however, safe exploration has been one of the main challenges, especially in contact-rich manipulation tasks in unstructured…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-06-21 Heng Zhang , Gokhan Solak , Gustavo J. G. Lahr , Arash Ajoudani

Risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RL) aims to optimize policies that balance the expected reward and risk. In this paper, we present a novel risk-sensitive RL framework that employs an Iterated Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-05 Yu Chen , Yihan Du , Pihe Hu , Siwei Wang , Desheng Wu , Longbo Huang

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a popular approach for robotic path planning in uncertain environments. However, the control policies trained for an RL agent crucially depend on user-defined, state-based reward functions. Poorly designed…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-12-05 Anand Balakrishnan , Stefan Jakšić , Edgar A. Aguilar , Dejan Ničković , Jyotirmoy V. Deshmukh

Reinforcement learning (RL) offers a compelling data-driven paradigm for synthesizing controllers for complex systems when accurate physical models are unavailable; however, most existing control-oriented RL methods assume stationarity and,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-22 Austin Coursey , Abel Diaz-Gonzalez , Marcos Quinones-Grueiro , Gautam Biswas

Real-world reinforcement learning (RL) problems often demand that agents behave safely by obeying a set of designed constraints. We address the challenge of safe RL by coupling a safety guide based on model predictive control (MPC) with a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-30 Samuel Pfrommer , Tanmay Gautam , Alec Zhou , Somayeh Sojoudi

Safety is critical to broadening the application of reinforcement learning (RL). Often, we train RL agents in a controlled environment, such as a laboratory, before deploying them in the real world. However, the real-world target task might…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-22 Qisong Yang , Thiago D. Simão , Nils Jansen , Simon H. Tindemans , Matthijs T. J. Spaan

Reinforcement learning (RL) commonly relies on scalar rewards with limited ability to express temporal, conditional, or safety-critical goals, and can lead to reward hacking. Temporal logic expressible via the more general class of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-26 Dominik Wagner , Leon Witzman , Luke Ong

In safety-critical robotic tasks, potential failures must be reduced, and multiple constraints must be met, such as avoiding collisions, limiting energy consumption, and maintaining balance. Thus, applying safe reinforcement learning (RL)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-27 Dohyeong Kim , Kyungjae Lee , Songhwai Oh

Reinforcement learning (RL) has recently been used for solving challenging decision-making problems in the context of automated driving. However, one of the main drawbacks of the presented RL-based policies is the lack of safety guarantees,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-07-16 Danial Kamran , Yu Ren , Martin Lauer

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

Recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL) enable its use on increasingly complex tasks, but the lack of formal safety guarantees still limits its application in safety-critical settings. A common practical approach is to augment the RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Donggeon David Oh , Duy P. Nguyen , Haimin Hu , Jaime F. Fisac

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

Despite recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL), its application in safety critical domains like autonomous vehicles is still challenging. Although punishing RL agents for risky situations can help to learn safe policies, it may also…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-07-16 Danial Kamran , Tizian Engelgeh , Marvin Busch , Johannes Fischer , Christoph Stiller

Reinforcement learning (RL)-based driver assistance systems seek to improve fuel consumption via continual improvement of powertrain control actions considering experiential data from the field. However, the need to explore diverse…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-01-04 Habtamu Hailemichael , Beshah Ayalew , Lindsey Kerbel , Andrej Ivanco , Keith Loiselle

Reinforcement learning (RL) agents are vulnerable to adversarial disturbances, which can deteriorate task performance or compromise safety specifications. Existing methods either address safety requirements under the assumption of no…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-14 Zeyang Li , Chuxiong Hu , Yunan Wang , Yujie Yang , Shengbo Eben Li

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