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Related papers: Shielded Reinforcement Learning for Hybrid Systems

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Agents controlled by the output of reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms often transition to unsafe states, particularly in uncertain and partially observable environments. Partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) provide a…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-09-16 Steven Carr , Georgios Bakirtzis , Ufuk Topcu

Scalability issues may prevent users from verifying critical properties of a complex hardware design. In this situation, we propose to synthesize a "safety shield" that is attached to the design to enforce the properties at run time. Shield…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2015-01-19 Roderick Bloem , Bettina Koenighofer , Robert Koenighofer , Chao Wang

Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms have found limited success beyond simulated applications, and one main reason is the absence of safety guarantees during the learning process. Real world systems would realistically fail or break…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-22 Richard Cheng , Gabor Orosz , Richard M. Murray , Joel W. Burdick

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been shown to be effective in many scenarios. However, it typically requires the exploration of a sufficiently large number of state-action pairs, some of which may be unsafe. Consequently, its application to…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-06-24 Yousef Emam , Gennaro Notomista , Paul Glotfelter , Zsolt Kira , Magnus Egerstedt

In swarm robotics, confrontation including the pursuit-evasion game is a key scenario. High uncertainty caused by unknown opponents' strategies, dynamic obstacles, and insufficient training complicates the action space into a hybrid…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-10-28 Qizhen Wu , Kexin Liu , Lei Chen , Jinhu Lü

There have been attempts in reinforcement learning to exploit a priori knowledge about the structure of the system. This paper proposes a hybrid reinforcement learning controller which dynamically interpolates a model-based linear…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-10 Nicholas Capel , Naifu Zhang

Safety controllers is widely used to achieve safe reinforcement learning. Most methods that apply a safety controller are using handcrafted safety constraints to construct the safety controller. However, when the environment dynamics are…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-09-22 Haoyu Wang , Xin Yuan , Qinqing Ren

The ability to learn and execute optimal control policies safely is critical to realization of complex autonomy, especially where task restarts are not available and/or the systems are safety-critical. Safety requirements are often…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-10-06 S M Nahid Mahmud , Moad Abudia , Scott A Nivison , Zachary I. Bell , Rushikesh Kamalapurkar

We introduce a hybrid (discrete--continuous) safety controller which enforces strict state and input constraints on a system---but only acts when necessary, preserving transparent operation of the original system within some safe region of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-11-22 Gray C. Thomas , Binghan He , Luis Sentis

A shield is attached to a system to guarantee safety by correcting the system's behavior at runtime. Existing methods that employ design-time synthesis of shields do not scale to multi-agent systems. Moreover, such shields are typically…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-03-02 Dhananjay Raju , Suda Bharadwaj , Ufuk Topcu

While reinforcement learning produces very promising results for many applications, its main disadvantage is the lack of safety guarantees, which prevents its use in safety-critical systems. In this work, we address this issue by a safety…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-03-15 Niklas Kochdumper , Hanna Krasowski , Xiao Wang , Stanley Bak , Matthias Althoff

This paper presents a safety-critical reinforcement learning framework for nonlinear dynamical systems with continuous state and input spaces operating under explicit physical constraints. Hard safety constraints are enforced independently…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-02-05 Hossein Rastgoftar

Many real-world control problems involve both discrete decision variables - such as the choice of control modes, gear switching or digital outputs - as well as continuous decision variables - such as velocity setpoints, control gains or…

The increasing adoption of Reinforcement Learning in safety-critical systems domains such as autonomous vehicles, health, and aviation raises the need for ensuring their safety. Existing safety mechanisms such as adversarial training,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-11 Paulina Stevia Nouwou Mindom , Amin Nikanjam , Foutse Khomh , John Mullins

Besides the recent impressive results on reinforcement learning (RL), safety is still one of the major research challenges in RL. RL is a machine-learning approach to determine near-optimal policies in Markov decision processes (MDPs). In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-06 Bettina Könighofer , Julian Rudolf , Alexander Palmisano , Martin Tappler , Roderick Bloem

We present Tempest, a synthesis tool to automatically create correct-by-construction reactive systems and shields from qualitative or quantitative specifications in probabilistic environments. A shield is a special type of reactive system…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2021-05-27 Stefan Pranger , Bettina Könighofer , Lukas Posch , Roderick Bloem

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

Safe Reinforcement learning (Safe RL) aims at learning optimal policies while staying safe. A popular solution to Safe RL is shielding, which uses a logical safety specification to prevent an RL agent from taking unsafe actions. However,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-03-07 Wen-Chi Yang , Giuseppe Marra , Gavin Rens , Luc De Raedt

In this paper we design hybrid control policies for hybrid systems whose mathematical models are unknown. Our contributions are threefold. First, we propose a framework for modelling the hybrid control design problem as a single Markov…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-09-03 Meet Gandhi , Atreyee Kundu , Shalabh Bhatnagar

This paper presents a risk-aware safe reinforcement learning (RL) control design for stochastic discrete-time linear systems. Rather than using a safety certifier to myopically intervene with the RL controller, a risk-informed safe…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-05-16 Babak Esmaeili , Nariman Niknejad , Hamidreza Modares