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Safety is critical when applying reinforcement learning (RL) to real-world problems. As a result, safe RL has emerged as a fundamental and powerful paradigm for optimizing an agent's policy while incorporating notions of safety. A prevalent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-09 Akifumi Wachi , Xun Shen , Yanan Sui

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful machine learning technique that enables an intelligent agent to learn an optimal policy that maximizes the cumulative rewards in sequential decision making. Most of methods in the existing…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-01-06 Chengchun Shi , Zhengling Qi , Jianing Wang , Fan Zhou

Mainstream approximate action-value iteration reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms suffer from overestimation bias, leading to suboptimal policies in high-variance stochastic environments. Quantile-based action-value iteration methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Clinton Enwerem , Aniruddh G. Puranic , John S. Baras , Calin Belta

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

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

Constrained Reinforcement Learning (CRL) aims to optimize decision-making policies under constraint conditions, making it highly applicable to safety-critical domains such as autonomous driving, robotics, and power grid management. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-16 Wentao Xu , Zhongming Yao , Weihao Li , Zhenghang Song , Yumeng Song , Tianyi Li , Yushuai Li

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising paradigm in complex and continuous robotic tasks, however, safe exploration has been one of the main challenges, especially in contact-rich manipulation tasks in unstructured…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-06-21 Heng Zhang , Gokhan Solak , Gustavo J. G. Lahr , Arash Ajoudani

In standard reinforcement learning (RL), a learning agent seeks to optimize the overall reward. However, many key aspects of a desired behavior are more naturally expressed as constraints. For instance, the designer may want to limit the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-29 Sobhan Miryoosefi , Kianté Brantley , Hal Daumé , Miroslav Dudik , Robert Schapire

In this paper, we study a novel episodic risk-sensitive Reinforcement Learning (RL) problem, named Iterated CVaR RL, which aims to maximize the tail of the reward-to-go at each step, and focuses on tightly controlling the risk of getting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-12 Yihan Du , Siwei Wang , Longbo Huang

We study risk-sensitive Reinforcement Learning (RL), where we aim to maximize the Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR) with a fixed risk tolerance $\tau$. Prior theoretical work studying risk-sensitive RL focuses on the tabular Markov Decision…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-21 Yulai Zhao , Wenhao Zhan , Xiaoyan Hu , Ho-fung Leung , Farzan Farnia , Wen Sun , Jason D. Lee

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

In safe Reinforcement Learning (RL), safety cost is typically defined as a function dependent on the immediate state and actions. In practice, safety constraints can often be non-Markovian due to the insufficient fidelity of state…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-07 Siow Meng Low , Akshat Kumar

Planning through crowded environments under uncertain obstacle motions remains difficult, as stochastic interactions often induce overly conservative behavior or reduced efficiency. To address this challenge, we propose an end-to-end risk…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Xinyi Wang , Taekyung Kim , Bardh Hoxha , Georgios Fainekos , Dimitra Panagou

Enforcing safety in the presence of stochastic uncertainty is a challenging problem. Traditionally, researchers have proposed safety in the statistical mean as a safety measure in this case. However, ensuring safety in the statistical mean…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-03-09 Mohamadreza Ahmadi , Xiaobin Xiong , Aaron D. Ames

Reinforcement learning (RL) commonly relies on scalar rewards with limited ability to express temporal, conditional, or safety-critical goals, and can lead to reward hacking. Temporal logic expressible via the more general class of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-26 Dominik Wagner , Leon Witzman , Luke Ong

Safe reinforcement learning (Safe RL) refers to a class of techniques that aim to prevent RL algorithms from violating constraints in the process of decision-making and exploration during trial and error. In this paper, a novel model-free…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-08-14 Homayoun Honari , Mehran Ghafarian Tamizi , Homayoun Najjaran

In safe offline reinforcement learning (RL), the objective is to develop a policy that maximizes cumulative rewards while strictly adhering to safety constraints, utilizing only offline data. Traditional methods often face difficulties in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Prajwal Koirala , Zhanhong Jiang , Soumik Sarkar , Cody Fleming

Options are generally learned by using an inaccurate environment model (or simulator), which contains uncertain model parameters. While there are several methods to learn options that are robust against the uncertainty of model parameters,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-01 Takuya Hiraoka , Takahisa Imagawa , Tatsuya Mori , Takashi Onishi , Yoshimasa Tsuruoka

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) is a standard paradigm for safety-critical decision making. However, real-world safety constraints can be complex, subjective, and even hard to explicitly specify. Existing works on constraint inference rely…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Chenglin Li , Grant Ruan , Hua Geng

Although Reinforcement Learning (RL) is effective for sequential decision-making problems under uncertainty, it still fails to thrive in real-world systems where risk or safety is a binding constraint. In this paper, we formulate the RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-07 Yannis Flet-Berliac , Debabrota Basu