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Related papers: Safety Margins for Reinforcement Learning

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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

Having a perfect model to compute the optimal policy is often infeasible in reinforcement learning. It is important in high-stakes domains to quantify and manage risk induced by model uncertainties. Entropic risk measure is an exponential…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-23 Reazul Hasan Russel , Bahram Behzadian , Marek Petrik

The widescale deployment of Autonomous Vehicles (AV) seems to be imminent despite many safety challenges that are yet to be resolved. It is well known that there are no universally agreed Verification and Validation (VV) methodologies to…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-03-05 Dhanoop Karunakaran , Stewart Worrall , Eduardo Nebot

Agentic systems are evaluated on benchmarks where agents interact with environments to solve tasks. Most papers report a pass@1 score computed from a single run per task, assuming this gives a reliable performance estimate. We test this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-26 Bjarni Haukur Bjarnason , André Silva , Martin Monperrus

Autonomous AI agents can remain fully authorized and still become unsafe as behavior drifts, adversaries adapt, and decision patterns shift without any code change. We propose the \textbf{Informational Viability Principle}: governing an…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-28 German Marin , Jatin Chaudhary

Multi-agent systems are prevalent in a wide range of domains including power systems, vehicular networks, and robotics. Two important problems to solve in these types of systems are how the intentions of non-coordinating agents can be…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Benjamin Alcorn , Eman Hammad

We consider the interaction among agents engaging in a driving task and we model it as general-sum game. This class of games exhibits a plurality of different equilibria posing the issue of equilibrium selection. While selecting the most…

Robotic systems often use predictive uncertainty to decide whether to act autonomously or defer to a fallback policy. In threshold-gated autonomy, uncertainty matters mainly through its ability to rank likely errors. Standard metrics such…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Johannes A. Gaus , Jhon P. F. Charaja , Daniel Haeufle

Intelligent systems are increasingly integral to our daily lives, yet rare safety-critical events present significant latent threats to their practical deployment. Addressing this challenge hinges on accurately predicting the probability of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-08 Ruoxuan Bai , Jingxuan Yang , Weiduo Gong , Yi Zhang , Qiujing Lu , Shuo Feng

Human drivers naturally balance the risks of different concerns while driving, including traffic rule violations, minor accidents, and fatalities. However, achieving the same behavior in autonomous driving systems remains an open problem.…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-03-06 Shuhao Qi , Zengjie Zhang , Zhiyong Sun , Sofie Haesaert

AI systems are increasingly applied to complex tasks that involve interaction with humans. During training, such systems are potentially dangerous, as they haven't yet learned to avoid actions that could cause serious harm. How can an AI…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-07-18 William Saunders , Girish Sastry , Andreas Stuhlmueller , Owain Evans

In this paper, we consider the problem of safety assessment for Markov decision processes without explicit knowledge of the model. We aim to learn probabilistic safety specifications associated with a given policy without compromising the…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-12-11 Abhijit Mazumdar , Rafal Wisniewski , Manuela L. Bujorianu

Reinforcement learning algorithms are generally designed to maximize the expected return across a population. However, a policy that is optimal on average may be suboptimal for certain individuals, leading to potential safety concerns. To…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-26 Jingyi Li , Peng Wu , Chengchun Shi

Safety filters provide a practical approach for enforcing safety constraints in autonomous systems. While learning-based tools scale to high-dimensional systems, their performance depends on informative data that includes states likely to…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-04-16 James Dallas , Thomas Lew , John Talbot , Jonathan DeCastro , Somil Bansal , John Subosits

To improve efficiency and reduce failures in autonomous vehicles, research has focused on developing robust and safe learning methods that take into account disturbances in the environment. Existing literature in robust reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-12 Xiaobai Ma , Katherine Driggs-Campbell , Mykel J. Kochenderfer

Safety is a critical feature of controller design for physical systems. When designing control policies, several approaches to guarantee this aspect of autonomy have been proposed, such as robust controllers or control barrier functions.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-26 Miguel Calvo-Fullana , Luiz F. O. Chamon , Santiago Paternain

This work in progress considers reachability-based safety analysis in the domain of autonomous driving in multi-agent systems. We formulate the safety problem for a car following scenario as a differential game and study how different…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-12-30 Gilbert Bahati , Marsalis Gibson , Alexandre Bayen

Safety is essential for reinforcement learning (RL) applied in real-world situations. Chance constraints are suitable to represent the safety requirements in stochastic systems. Previous chance-constrained RL methods usually have a low…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-17 Baiyu Peng , Yao Mu , Yang Guan , Shengbo Eben Li , Yuming Yin , Jianyu Chen

Safe reinforcement learning deals with mitigating or avoiding unsafe situations by reinforcement learning (RL) agents. Safe RL approaches are based on specific risk representations for particular problems or domains. In order to analyze…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-11 Leonardo Villalobos-Arias , Derek Martin , Abhijeet Krishnan , Madeleine Gagné , Colin M. Potts , Arnav Jhala

Sequential decision making using Markov Decision Process underpins many realworld applications. Both model-based and model free methods have achieved strong results in these settings. However, real-world tasks must balance reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-01 Janaka Chathuranga Brahmanage , Akshat Kumar