English
Related papers

Related papers: Probabilistic Counterexample Guidance for Safer Re…

200 papers

Safety remains a central obstacle preventing widespread use of RL in the real world: learning new tasks in uncertain environments requires extensive exploration, but safety requires limiting exploration. We propose Recovery RL, an algorithm…

Accurate risk quantification and reachability analysis are crucial for safe control and learning, but sampling from rare events, risky states, or long-term trajectories can be prohibitively costly. Motivated by this, we study how to…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-12-31 Hikaru Hoshino , Yorie Nakahira

In reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms, exploratory control inputs are used during learning to acquire knowledge for decision making and control, while the true dynamics of a controlled object is unknown. However, this exploring property…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-08 Yoshihiro Okawa , Tomotake Sasaki , Hidenao Iwane

The exploration \& exploitation dilemma poses significant challenges in reinforcement learning (RL). Recently, curiosity-based exploration methods achieved great success in tackling hard-exploration problems. However, they necessitate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-06 Yiran Wang , Chenshu Liu , Yunfan Li , Sanae Amani , Bolei Zhou , Lin F. Yang

We study the problem of safe learning and exploration in sequential control problems. The goal is to safely collect data samples from operating in an environment, in order to learn to achieve a challenging control goal (e.g., an agile…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-30 Anqi Liu , Guanya Shi , Soon-Jo Chung , Anima Anandkumar , Yisong Yue

Reinforcement learning (RL) agents improve through trial-and-error, but when reward is sparse and the agent cannot discover successful action sequences, learning stagnates. This has been a notable problem in training deep RL agents to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-02-27 Evan Zheran Liu , Kelvin Guu , Panupong Pasupat , Tianlin Shi , Percy Liang

When safety is formulated as a limit of cumulative cost, safe reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn policies that maximize return subject to the cost constraint in data collection and deployment. Off-policy safe RL methods, although…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-26 Guopeng Li , Matthijs T. J. Spaan , Julian F. P. Kooij

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 has been successfully used to solve difficult tasks in complex unknown environments. However, these methods typically do not provide any safety guarantees during the learning process. This is particularly problematic,…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2019-07-02 Torsten Koller , Felix Berkenkamp , Matteo Turchetta , Joschka Boedecker , Andreas Krause

During initial iterations of training in most Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms, agents perform a significant number of random exploratory steps. In the real world, this can limit the practicality of these algorithms as it can lead to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-17 Ashish Kumar Jayant , Shalabh Bhatnagar

We study the problem of safe offline reinforcement learning (RL), the goal is to learn a policy that maximizes long-term reward while satisfying safety constraints given only offline data, without further interaction with the environment.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-11 Haoran Xu , Xianyuan Zhan , Xiangyu Zhu

Safe exploration is a common problem in reinforcement learning (RL) that aims to prevent agents from making disastrous decisions while exploring their environment. A family of approaches to this problem assume domain knowledge in the form…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-08-24 Steven Carr , Nils Jansen , Sebastian Junges , Ufuk Topcu

Reward-free reinforcement learning (RF-RL), a recently introduced RL paradigm, relies on random action-taking to explore the unknown environment without any reward feedback information. While the primary goal of the exploration phase in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-23 Ruiquan Huang , Jing Yang , Yingbin Liang

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful framework for decision-making in uncertain environments, but it often requires large amounts of data to learn an optimal policy. We address this challenge by incorporating prior model knowledge to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-29 J. S. van Hulst , W. P. M. H. Heemels , D. J. Antunes

Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning (GCRL) provides a versatile framework for developing unified controllers capable of handling wide ranges of tasks, exploring environments, and adapting behaviors. However, its reliance on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-20 Charly Pecqueux-Guézénec , Stéphane Doncieux , Nicolas Perrin-Gilbert

Reinforcement Learning (RL) for control has become increasingly popular due to its ability to learn rich feedback policies that take into account uncertainty and complex representations of the environment. When considering safety…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-21 Sean Vaskov , Wilko Schwarting , Chris L. Baker

Safe exploration is essential for the practical use of reinforcement learning (RL) in many real-world scenarios. In this paper, we present a generalized safe exploration (GSE) problem as a unified formulation of common safe exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-06 Akifumi Wachi , Wataru Hashimoto , Xun Shen , Kazumune Hashimoto

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

Designing reliable decision strategies for autonomous urban driving is challenging. Reinforcement learning (RL) has been used to automatically derive suitable behavior in uncertain environments, but it does not provide any guarantee on the…

Despite recent progress in reinforcement learning (RL), RL algorithms for exploration still remain an active area of research. Existing methods often focus on state-based metrics, which do not consider the underlying causal structures of…