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Reinforcement Learning (RL) has demonstrated state-of-the-art results in a number of autonomous system applications, however many of the underlying algorithms rely on black-box predictions. This results in poor explainability of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-27 Matt Benatan , Edward O. Pyzer-Knapp

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) often leverage Reinforcement Learning (RL) techniques to adapt dynamically to changing environments and optimize performance. However, it is challenging to construct safety cases for RL components. We therefore…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-03-13 Katherine Dearstyne , Pedro , Alarcon Granadeno , Theodore Chambers , Jane Cleland-Huang

Safety comes first in many real-world applications involving autonomous agents. Despite a large number of reinforcement learning (RL) methods focusing on safety-critical tasks, there is still a lack of high-quality evaluation of those…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-13 Linrui Zhang , Qin Zhang , Li Shen , Bo Yuan , Xueqian Wang , Dacheng Tao

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

Before deploying autonomous agents in the real world, we need to be confident they will perform safely in novel situations. Ideally, we would expose agents to a very wide range of situations during training, allowing them to learn about…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-03 Zachary Kenton , Angelos Filos , Owain Evans , Yarin Gal

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising approach for robotic navigation, allowing robots to learn through trial and error. However, real-world robotic tasks often suffer from sparse rewards, leading to inefficient exploration and…

Satisfying safety constraints almost surely (or with probability one) can be critical for the deployment of Reinforcement Learning (RL) in real-life applications. For example, plane landing and take-off should ideally occur with probability…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-23 Aivar Sootla , Alexander I. Cowen-Rivers , Taher Jafferjee , Ziyan Wang , David Mguni , Jun Wang , Haitham Bou-Ammar

This paper targets the efficient construction of a safety shield for decision making in scenarios that incorporate uncertainty. Markov decision processes (MDPs) are prominent models to capture such planning problems. Reinforcement learning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-11-26 Nils Jansen , Bettina Könighofer , Sebastian Junges , Alexandru C. Serban , Roderick Bloem

Meta reinforcement learning (RL) allows agents to leverage experience across a distribution of tasks on which the agent can train at will, enabling faster learning of optimal policies on new test tasks. Despite its success in improving…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Tingting Ni , Maryam Kamgarpour

In safe reinforcement learning, agent needs to balance between exploration actions and safety constraints. Following this paradigm, domain transfer approaches learn a prior Q-function from the related environments to prevent unsafe actions.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-29 Duc Kien Doan , Bang Giang Le , Viet Cuong Ta

Many real-world multiagent learning problems involve safety concerns. In these setups, typical safe reinforcement learning algorithms constrain agents' behavior, limiting exploration -- a crucial component for discovering effective…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2025-08-27 Ayhan Alp Aydeniz , Enrico Marchesini , Robert Loftin , Christopher Amato , Kagan Tumer

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

In the Bayesian reinforcement learning (RL) setting, a prior distribution over the unknown problem parameters -- the rewards and transitions -- is assumed, and a policy that optimizes the (posterior) expected return is sought. A common…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-27 Aviv Tamar , Daniel Soudry , Ev Zisselman

Policy search reinforcement learning allows robots to acquire skills by themselves. However, the learning procedure is inherently unsafe as the robot has no a-priori way to predict the consequences of the exploratory actions it takes.…

Robotics · Computer Science 2018-10-09 Jens Lundell , Robert Krug , Erik Schaffernicht , Todor Stoyanov , Ville Kyrki

It is common practice in reinforcement learning (RL) research to train and deploy agents in bespoke simulators, typically implemented by engineers directly in general-purpose programming languages or hardware acceleration frameworks such as…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-08-12 Dennis J. N. J. Soemers , Spyridon Samothrakis , Kurt Driessens , Mark H. M. Winands

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

Ensuring the safety of reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms is crucial to unlock their potential for many real-world tasks. However, vanilla RL and most safe RL approaches do not guarantee safety. In recent years, several methods have…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-21 Hanna Krasowski , Jakob Thumm , Marlon Müller , Lukas Schäfer , Xiao Wang , Matthias Althoff

Balancing exploration and conservatism in the constrained setting is an important problem if we are to use reinforcement learning for meaningful tasks in the real world. In this paper, we propose a principled algorithm for safe exploration…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-04-24 Alexander W. Goodall , Francesco Belardinelli

How can a scientist use a Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithm to design experiments over a dynamical system's state space? In the case of finite and Markovian systems, an area called Active Exploration (AE) relaxes the optimization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-19 Riccardo De Santi , Federico Arangath Joseph , Noah Liniger , Mirco Mutti , Andreas Krause

Reinforcement learning with general utilities (RLGU) offers a unifying framework to capture several problems beyond standard expected returns, including imitation learning, pure exploration, and safe RL. Despite recent fundamental advances…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Anas Barakat , Souradip Chakraborty , Peihong Yu , Pratap Tokekar , Amrit Singh Bedi