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Related papers: TRC: Trust Region Conditional Value at Risk for Sa…

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In this work, we study risk-aware reinforcement learning for quadrupedal locomotion. Our approach trains a family of risk-conditioned policies using a Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR) constrained policy optimization technique that provides…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-10-17 Yuanhong Zeng , Anushri Dixit

Reinforcement learning (RL), while powerful and expressive, can often prioritize performance at the expense of safety. Yet safety violations can lead to catastrophic outcomes in real-world deployments. Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) offer…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-19 Lizhi Yang , Blake Werner , Massimiliano de Sa , Aaron D. Ames

In this work, we study the sample complexity problem of risk-sensitive Reinforcement Learning (RL) with a generative model, where we aim to maximize the Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR) with risk tolerance level $\tau$ at each step, a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-25 Zilong Deng , Simon Khan , Shaofeng Zou

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has achieved groundbreaking successes in a wide variety of robotic applications. A natural consequence is the adoption of this paradigm for safety-critical tasks, where human safety and expensive hardware…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-06-22 Davide Corsi , Raz Yerushalmi , Guy Amir , Alessandro Farinelli , David Harel , Guy Katz

We study constrained reinforcement learning (CRL) from a novel perspective by setting constraints directly on state density functions, rather than the value functions considered by previous works. State density has a clear physical and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-25 Zengyi Qin , Yuxiao Chen , Chuchu Fan

Reinforcement learning (RL) methods for social robot navigation show great success navigating robots through large crowds of people, but the performance of these learning-based methods tends to degrade in particularly challenging or…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-08-14 Sara Pohland , Alvin Tan , Prabal Dutta , Claire Tomlin

Despite the many recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL), the question of learning policies that robustly satisfy state constraints under unknown disturbances remains open. In this paper, we offer a new perspective on achieving…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Pierre-François Massiani , Alexander von Rohr , Lukas Haverbeck , Sebastian Trimpe

In risk-averse reinforcement learning (RL), the goal is to optimize some risk measure of the returns. A risk measure often focuses on the worst returns out of the agent's experience. As a result, standard methods for risk-averse RL often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-13 Ido Greenberg , Yinlam Chow , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Shie Mannor

An important problem in reinforcement learning is designing agents that learn to solve tasks safely in an environment. A common solution is for a human expert to define either a penalty in the reward function or a cost to be minimised when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-02 Geraud Nangue Tasse , Tamlin Love , Mark Nemecek , Steven James , Benjamin Rosman

The large-scale integration of intermittent renewable energy resources introduces increased uncertainty and volatility to the supply side of power systems, thereby complicating system operation and control. Recently, data-driven approaches,…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-07-02 Peipei Yu , Zhenyi Wang , Hongcai Zhang , Yonghua Song

Reinforcement learning (RL)-based adaptive cruise control systems (ACC) that learn and adapt to road, traffic and vehicle conditions are attractive for enhancing vehicle energy efficiency and traffic flow. However, the application of RL in…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-01-04 Habtamu Hailemichael , Beshah Ayalew , Lindsey Kerbel , Andrej Ivanco , Keith Loiselle

Recently, there has been a surge in interest in safe and robust techniques within reinforcement learning (RL). Current notions of risk in RL fail to capture the potential for systemic failures such as abrupt stoppages from system failures…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2019-10-09 David Mguni

Reinforcement Learning (RL) for control has become increasingly popular due to its ability to learn rich feedback policies that take into account uncertainty and complex representations of the environment. When considering safety…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-21 Sean Vaskov , Wilko Schwarting , Chris L. Baker

Robust Markov Decision Processes (RMDPs) have received significant research interest, offering an alternative to standard Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) that often assume fixed transition probabilities. RMDPs address this by optimizing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-06 Xinyi Ni , Lifeng Lai

This paper focuses on finding reinforcement learning policies for control systems with hard state and action constraints. Despite its success in many domains, reinforcement learning is challenging to apply to problems with hard constraints,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-24 Liyuan Zheng , Yuanyuan Shi , Lillian J. Ratliff , Baosen Zhang

Safe Reinforcement Learning (Safe RL) aims to train an RL agent to maximize its performance in real-world environments while adhering to safety constraints, as exceeding safety violation limits can result in severe consequences. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-07 Hanping Zhang , Yuhong Guo

During initial iterations of training in most Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms, agents perform a significant number of random exploratory steps. In the real world, this can limit the practicality of these algorithms as it can lead to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-17 Ashish Kumar Jayant , Shalabh Bhatnagar

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) is a popular and versatile paradigm to learn reward-maximizing policies with safety guarantees. Previous works tend to express the safety constraints in an expectation form due to the ease of implementation,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-18 Chenglin Li , Guangchun Ruan , Hua Geng

In safe reinforcement learning (RL), auxiliary safety costs are used to align the agent to safe decision making. In practice, safety constraints, including cost functions and budgets, are unknown or hard to specify, as it requires…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-24 Siow Meng Low , Akshat Kumar

Reinforcement learning has demonstrated significant potential in the field of autonomous driving. However, it suffers from defects such as training instability and unsafe action outputs when faced with autonomous racing environments…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-09 Bo Leng , Weiqi Zhang , Zhuoren Li , Lu Xiong , Guizhe Jin , Ran Yu , Chen Lv