English
Related papers

Related papers: Value Functions are Control Barrier Functions: Ver…

200 papers

Ensuring safe exploration in high-dimensional systems with unknown dynamics remains a significant challenge. Existing safe reinforcement learning methods often provide safety guarantees only in expectation, which can still lead to safety…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Rahul Narava , Siddharth Verma , Ojas Jain , Shashi Shekhar Jha , Mayank Shekhar Jha

The safety of training task policies and their subsequent application using reinforcement learning (RL) methods has become a focal point in the field of safe RL. A central challenge in this area remains the establishment of theoretical…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-05-02 Chenggang Wang , Xinyi Wang , Yutong Dong , Lei Song , Xinping Guan

Training-time safety violations have been a major concern when we deploy reinforcement learning algorithms in the real world. This paper explores the possibility of safe RL algorithms with zero training-time safety violations in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-14 Yuping Luo , Tengyu Ma

Learning-based control has recently shown great efficacy in performing complex tasks for various applications. However, to deploy it in real systems, it is of vital importance to guarantee the system will stay safe. Control Barrier…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-09-05 Fernando Castañeda , Jason J. Choi , Wonsuhk Jung , Bike Zhang , Claire J. Tomlin , Koushil Sreenath

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

Safety in reinforcement learning (RL) is a key property in both training and execution in many domains such as autonomous driving or finance. In this paper, we formalize it with a constrained RL formulation in the distributional RL setting.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-01 Jianyi Zhang , Paul Weng

Safety-critical control is a crucial aspect of modern systems, and Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) have gained popularity as the framework of choice for ensuring safety. However, implementing a CBF requires exact knowledge of the true…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-08-26 Rahal Nanayakkara , Aaron D. Ames , Paulo Tabuada

Safety constraints and optimality are important, but sometimes conflicting criteria for controllers. Although these criteria are often solved separately with different tools to maintain formal guarantees, it is also common practice in…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-06-10 Pierre-François Massiani , Steve Heim , Friedrich Solowjow , Sebastian Trimpe

Modern nonlinear control theory seeks to endow systems with properties of stability and safety, and have been deployed successfully in multiple domains. Despite this success, model uncertainty remains a significant challenge in synthesizing…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2019-12-24 Andrew Taylor , Andrew Singletary , Yisong Yue , Aaron Ames

Reinforcement Learning (RL) uses rewards to guide learning, yet reward design is typically hand-crafted using heuristics that can be difficult to tune. We propose a Control Barrier Function (CBF)-informed reward design for Multi-Agent RL…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Jianye Xu , Bassam Alrifaee

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) for downstream tasks typically exhibit a fundamental safety-capability tradeoff, where improving task performance degrades safety alignment even on benign datasets. This degradation persists across…

Amidst the growing demand for implementing advanced control and decision-making algorithms|to enhance the reliability, resilience, and stability of power systems|arises a crucial concern regarding the safety of employing machine learning…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-07-25 Amr S. Mohamed , Emily Nguyen , Deepa Kundur

Humans have the ability to deviate from their natural behavior when necessary, which is a cognitive process called response inhibition. Similar approaches have independently received increasing attention in recent years for ensuring the…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-10-04 Armin Lederer , Erfaun Noorani , John S. Baras , Sandra Hirche

Reinforcement learning (RL) agents need to explore their environment to learn optimal behaviors and achieve maximum rewards. However, exploration can be risky when training RL directly on real systems, while simulation-based training…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Dvij Kalaria , Qin Lin , John M. Dolan

Recently, safe reinforcement learning (RL) with the actor-critic structure for continuous control tasks has received increasing attention. It is still challenging to learn a near-optimal control policy with safety and convergence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-06 Xinglong Zhang , Yaoqian Peng , Biao Luo , Wei Pan , Xin Xu , Haibin Xie

Given the availability of more comprehensive measurement data in modern power systems, reinforcement learning (RL) has gained significant interest in operation and control. Conventional RL relies on trial-and-error interactions with the…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-07-01 Tong Su , Tong Wu , Junbo Zhao , Anna Scaglione , Le Xie

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

Under voltage load shedding has been considered as a standard and effective measure to recover the voltage stability of the electric power grid under emergency and severe conditions. However, this scheme usually trips a massive amount of…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-10-01 Thanh Long Vu , Sayak Mukherjee , Renke Huang , Qiuhua Hung

Learning-enabled control systems have demonstrated impressive empirical performance on challenging control problems in robotics, but this performance comes at the cost of reduced transparency and lack of guarantees on the safety or…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-12-21 Charles Dawson , Sicun Gao , Chuchu Fan

Dealing with high variance is a significant challenge in model-free reinforcement learning (RL). Existing methods are unreliable, exhibiting high variance in performance from run to run using different initializations/seeds. Focusing on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-15 Richard Cheng , Abhinav Verma , Gabor Orosz , Swarat Chaudhuri , Yisong Yue , Joel W. Burdick