English
Related papers

Related papers: Safe Exploration in Reinforcement Learning: Traini…

200 papers

This paper addresses learning safe output feedback control laws from partial observations of expert demonstrations. We assume that a model of the system dynamics and a state estimator are available along with corresponding error bounds,…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-04-04 Lars Lindemann , Alexander Robey , Lejun Jiang , Satyajeet Das , Stephen Tu , Nikolai Matni

Guaranteeing safe behaviour of reinforcement learning (RL) policies poses significant challenges for safety-critical applications, despite RL's generality and scalability. To address this, we propose a new approach to apply verification…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-06 Daniel C. H. Tan , Fernando Acero , Robert McCarthy , Dimitrios Kanoulas , Zhibin Li

Robustness and safety are critical for the trustworthy deployment of deep reinforcement learning. Real-world decision making applications require algorithms that can guarantee robust performance and safety in the presence of general…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-29 James Queeney , Erhan Can Ozcan , Ioannis Ch. Paschalidis , Christos G. Cassandras

Safe exploration is essential for the practical use of reinforcement learning (RL) in many real-world scenarios. In this paper, we present a generalized safe exploration (GSE) problem as a unified formulation of common safe exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-06 Akifumi Wachi , Wataru Hashimoto , Xun Shen , Kazumune Hashimoto

A key challenge to deploying reinforcement learning in practice is avoiding excessive (harmful) exploration in individual episodes. We propose a natural constraint on exploration -- \textit{uniformly} outperforming a conservative policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-27 Wanqiao Xu , Jason Yecheng Ma , Kan Xu , Hamsa Bastani , Osbert Bastani

This paper implements deep reinforcement learning (DRL) with a safety filter for spacecraft reorientation control with a single pointing keep-out zone. A new state space representation is designed which includes a compact representation of…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-05-20 Juntang Yang , Mohamed Khalil Ben-Larbi

Learning-based control has recently shown great efficacy in performing complex tasks for various applications. However, to deploy it in real systems, it is of vital importance to guarantee the system will stay safe. Control Barrier…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-09-05 Fernando Castañeda , Jason J. Choi , Wonsuhk Jung , Bike Zhang , Claire J. Tomlin , Koushil Sreenath

This paper studies safe Reinforcement Learning (safe RL) with linear function approximation and under hard instantaneous constraints where unsafe actions must be avoided at each step. Existing studies have considered safe RL with hard…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-25 Honghao Wei , Xin Liu , Lei Ying

Safe exploration is a key requirement for reinforcement learning (RL) agents to learn and adapt online, beyond controlled (e.g. simulated) environments. In this work, we tackle this challenge by utilizing suboptimal yet conservative…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Manuel Wendl , Yarden As , Manish Prajapat , Anton Pollak , Stelian Coros , Andreas Krause

Ensuring safety is important for the practical deployment of reinforcement learning (RL). Various challenges must be addressed, such as handling stochasticity in the environments, providing rigorous guarantees of persistent state-wise…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-26 Milan Ganai , Zheng Gong , Chenning Yu , Sylvia Herbert , Sicun Gao

Safely exploring an unknown dynamical system is critical to the deployment of reinforcement learning (RL) in physical systems where failures may have catastrophic consequences. In scenarios where one knows little about the dynamics, diverse…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-12-01 Tyler Lu , Martin Zinkevich , Craig Boutilier , Binz Roy , Dale Schuurmans

Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms show amazing performance in recent years, but placing RL in real-world applications such as self-driven vehicles may suffer safety problems. A self-driven vehicle moving to a target position following…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-07-05 Huanhui Cao , Zhiyuan Cai , Hairuo Wei , Wenjie Lu , Lin Zhang , Hao Xiong

The current state-of-the-art backdoor attacks against Reinforcement Learning (RL) rely upon unrealistically permissive access models, that assume the attacker can read (or even write) the victim's policy parameters, observations, or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Shijie Liu , Andrew C. Cullen , Paul Montague , Sarah Erfani , Benjamin I. P. Rubinstein

The deployment of Reinforcement Learning (RL) in real-world applications is constrained by its failure to satisfy safety criteria. Existing Safe Reinforcement Learning (SafeRL) methods, which rely on cost functions to enforce safety, often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-09 Weidong Huang , Jiaming Ji , Chunhe Xia , Borong Zhang , Yaodong Yang

We present Revel, a partially neural reinforcement learning (RL) framework for provably safe exploration in continuous state and action spaces. A key challenge for provably safe deep RL is that repeatedly verifying neural networks within a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-27 Greg Anderson , Abhinav Verma , Isil Dillig , Swarat Chaudhuri

Ensuring the safety of reinforcement learning (RL) policies in high-stakes environments requires not only formal verification but also interpretability and targeted falsification. While model checking provides formal guarantees, its…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-06-05 Tuan Le , Risal Shefin , Debashis Gupta , Thai Le , Sarra Alqahtani

Using reinforcement learning to learn control policies is a challenge when the task is complex with potentially long horizons. Ensuring adequate but safe exploration is also crucial for controlling physical systems. In this paper, we use…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-26 Xiao Li , Calin Belta

Safety remains a central obstacle preventing widespread use of RL in the real world: learning new tasks in uncertain environments requires extensive exploration, but safety requires limiting exploration. We propose Recovery RL, an algorithm…

Optimal control strategies are often combined with safety certificates to ensure both performance and safety in safety-critical systems. A prominent example is combining Model Predictive Control (MPC) with Control Barrier Functions (CBF).…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-12-05 Kerim Dzhumageldyev , Filippo Airaldi , Azita Dabiri

Autonomous drifting is a complex and crucial maneuver for safety-critical scenarios like slippery roads and emergency collision avoidance, requiring precise motion planning and control. Traditional motion planning methods often struggle…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-07-01 Bei Zhou , Baha Zarrouki , Mattia Piccinini , Cheng Hu , Lei Xie , Johannes Betz