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The last half-decade has seen a steep rise in the number of contributions on safe learning methods for real-world robotic deployments from both the control and reinforcement learning communities. This article provides a concise but holistic…

In model-based reinforcement learning for safety-critical control systems, it is important to formally certify system properties (e.g., safety, stability) under the learned controller. However, as existing methods typically apply formal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-22 Yixuan Wang , Simon Zhan , Zhilu Wang , Chao Huang , Zhaoran Wang , Zhuoran Yang , Qi Zhu

Learning reliably safe autonomous control is one of the core problems in trustworthy autonomy. However, training a controller that can be formally verified to be safe remains a major challenge. We introduce a novel approach for learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-19 Junlin Wu , Huan Zhang , Yevgeniy Vorobeychik

Establishing stability certificates for closed-loop systems under reinforcement learning (RL) policies is essential to move beyond empirical performance and offer guarantees of system behavior. Classical Lyapunov methods require a strict…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Kehan Long , Jorge Cortés , Nikolay Atanasov

Lack of reliability is a well-known issue for reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. This problem has gained increasing attention in recent years, and efforts to improve it have grown substantially. To aid RL researchers and production…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-02-14 Stephanie C. Y. Chan , Samuel Fishman , John Canny , Anoop Korattikara , Sergio Guadarrama

This tutorial provides a critical review of the practical application of Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) in robotic safety. While the theoretical foundations of CBFs are well-established, I identify a recurring gap between the mathematical…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Taekyung Kim

Using reinforcement learning to learn control policies is a challenge when the task is complex with potentially long horizons. Ensuring adequate but safe exploration is also crucial for controlling physical systems. In this paper, we use…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-26 Xiao Li , Calin Belta

This paper develops a model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) framework for learning online the value function of an infinite-horizon optimal control problem while obeying safety constraints expressed as control barrier functions (CBFs).…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-10 Max H. Cohen , Calin Belta

Groundbreaking successes have been achieved by Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) in solving practical decision-making problems. Robotics, in particular, can involve high-cost hardware and human interactions. Hence, scrupulous evaluations of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-10-20 Davide Corsi , Enrico Marchesini , Alessandro Farinelli

Learning from Demonstration (LfD) is a powerful method for enabling robots to perform novel tasks as it is often more tractable for a non-roboticist end-user to demonstrate the desired skill and for the robot to efficiently learn from the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-03-08 Yue Yang , Letian Chen , Matthew Gombolay

Cost functions are commonly employed in Safe Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL). However, the cost is typically encoded as an indicator function due to the difficulty of quantifying the risk of policy decisions in the state space. Such an…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-02-21 Enrico Marchesini , Luca Marzari , Alessandro Farinelli , Christopher Amato

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) seeks to mitigate unsafe behaviors that arise from exploration during training by reducing constraint violations while maintaining task performance. Existing approaches typically rely on a single policy to…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Murad Dawood , Usama Ahmed Siddiquie , Shahram Khorshidi , Maren Bennewitz

Reinforcement learning (RL) exhibits impressive performance when managing complicated control tasks for robots. However, its wide application to physical robots is limited by the absence of strong safety guarantees. To overcome this…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-05-18 Desong Du , Shaohang Han , Naiming Qi , Haitham Bou Ammar , Jun Wang , Wei Pan

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has achieved tremendous success in many complex decision-making tasks. However, safety concerns are raised during deploying RL in real-world applications, leading to a growing demand for safe RL algorithms, such…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-05-28 Shangding Gu , Long Yang , Yali Du , Guang Chen , Florian Walter , Jun Wang , Alois Knoll

We consider the problem of finding optimal policies for a Markov Decision Process with almost sure constraints on state transitions and action triplets. We define value and action-value functions that satisfy a barrier-based decomposition…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-25 Agustin Castellano , Juan Bazerque , Enrique Mallada

An emerging field of sequential decision problems is safe Reinforcement Learning (RL), where the objective is to maximize the reward while obeying safety constraints. Being able to handle constraints is essential for deploying RL agents in…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-03-08 Nick Bührer , Zhejun Zhang , Alexander Liniger , Fisher Yu , Luc Van Gool

With the increasing power of computers and the rapid development of self-learning methodologies such as machine learning and artificial intelligence, the problem of constructing an automatic Financial Trading Systems (FTFs) becomes an…

Trading and Market Microstructure · Quantitative Finance 2019-08-29 Haoqian Li , Thomas Lau

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) methods have been proven successful in solving manipulation tasks autonomously. However, RL is still not widely adopted on real robotic systems because working with real hardware entails additional challenges,…

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