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Related papers: Safety Margins for Reinforcement Learning

200 papers

Autonomous vehicles currently suffer from a time-inefficient driving style caused by uncertainty about human behavior in traffic interactions. Accurate and reliable prediction models enabling more efficient trajectory planning could make…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-02-21 Julian Frederik Schumann , Jens Kober , Arkady Zgonnikov

We propose to leverage epistemic uncertainty about constraint satisfaction of a reinforcement learner in safety critical domains. We introduce a framework for specification of requirements for reinforcement learners in constrained settings,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-02-09 Lenz Belzner , Martin Wirsing

Credible safety plans for advanced AI development require methods to verify agent behavior and detect potential control deficiencies early. A fundamental aspect is ensuring agents adhere to safety-critical principles, especially when these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-11 Ram Potham

Generating accurate runtime safety estimates for autonomous systems is vital to ensuring their continued proliferation. However, exhaustive reasoning about future behaviors is generally too complex to do at runtime. To provide scalable and…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2023-03-30 Matthew Cleaveland , Oleg Sokolsky , Insup Lee , Ivan Ruchkin

Reinforcement learning (RL) is an effective approach to motion planning in autonomous driving, where an optimal driving policy can be automatically learned using the interaction data with the environment. Nevertheless, the reward function…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-08-28 Lin-Chi Wu , Zengjie Zhang , Sofie Haesaert , Zhiqiang Ma , Zhiyong Sun

Safety-critical robot systems need thorough testing to expose design flaws and software bugs which could endanger humans. Testing in simulation is becoming increasingly popular, as it can be applied early in the development process and does…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a potent tool for sequential decision-making and has achieved performance surpassing human capabilities across many challenging real-world tasks. As the extension of RL in the multi-agent system domain,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-08-20 Ruiqi Zhang , Jing Hou , Florian Walter , Shangding Gu , Jiayi Guan , Florian Röhrbein , Yali Du , Panpan Cai , Guang Chen , Alois Knoll

As Large Language Model (LLM) agents increasingly operate in complex environments with real-world consequences, their safety becomes critical. While uncertainty quantification is well-studied for single-turn tasks, multi-turn agentic…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Vamshi Krishna Bonagiri , Ponnurangam Kumaragurum , Khanh Nguyen , Benjamin Plaut

Estimating uncertainty for AI agents in real-world multi-turn tool-using interaction with humans is difficult because failures are often triggered by sparse critical episodes (e.g., looping, incoherent tool use, or user-agent…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Sina Tayebati , Divake Kumar , Nastaran Darabi , Davide Ettori , Ranganath Krishnan , Amit Ranjan Trivedi

The AI safety literature is full of examples of powerful AI agents that, in blindly pursuing a specific and usually narrow objective, ends up with unacceptable and even catastrophic collateral damage to others. In this paper, we consider…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-04-15 Kee Siong Ng , Samuel Yang-Zhao , Timothy Cadogan-Cowper

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…

Extracting interesting scenarios from real-world data as well as generating failure cases is important for the development and testing of autonomous systems. We propose efficient mechanisms to both characterize and generate testing…

Automated control monitors could play an important role in overseeing highly capable AI agents that we do not fully trust. Prior work has explored control monitoring in simplified settings, but scaling monitoring to real-world deployments…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-12-30 David Lindner , Charlie Griffin , Tomek Korbak , Roland S. Zimmermann , Geoffrey Irving , Sebastian Farquhar , Alan Cooney

The development of Autonomous Vehicles (AV) presents an opportunity to save and improve lives. However, achieving SAE Level 5 (full) autonomy will require overcoming many technical challenges. There is a gap in the literature regarding the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-03-08 Eduardo Candela , Yuxiang Feng , Panagiotis Angeloudis , Yiannis Demiris

A characteristic of reinforcement learning is the ability to develop unforeseen strategies when solving problems. While such strategies sometimes yield superior performance, they may also result in undesired or even dangerous behavior. In…

This paper proposes a suite of rationality measures and associated theory for reinforcement learning agents, a property increasingly critical yet rarely explored. We define an action in deployment to be perfectly rational if it maximises…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Kejiang Qian , Amos Storkey , Fengxiang He

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

We present a suite of reinforcement learning environments illustrating various safety properties of intelligent agents. These problems include safe interruptibility, avoiding side effects, absent supervisor, reward gaming, safe exploration,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-11-29 Jan Leike , Miljan Martic , Victoria Krakovna , Pedro A. Ortega , Tom Everitt , Andrew Lefrancq , Laurent Orseau , Shane Legg

We consider an online strategic classification problem where each arriving agent can manipulate their true feature vector to obtain a positive predicted label, while incurring a cost that depends on the amount of manipulation. The learner…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-28 Lingqing Shen , Nam Ho-Nguyen , Khanh-Hung Giang-Tran , Fatma Kılınç-Karzan

Indirect prompt injection attacks threaten AI agents that execute consequential actions, motivating deterministic system-level defenses. Such defenses can provably block unsafe actions by enforcing confidentiality and integrity policies,…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Aashish Kolluri , Rishi Sharma , Manuel Costa , Boris Köpf , Tobias Nießen , Mark Russinovich , Shruti Tople , Santiago Zanella-Béguelin