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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

Reinforcement learning (RL) excels in applications such as video games, but ensuring safety as well as the ability to achieve the specified goals remains challenging when using RL for real-world problems, such as human-aligned tasks where…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-21 Liqun Zhao , Keyan Miao , Konstantinos Gatsis , Antonis Papachristodoulou

Reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated impressive performance in various areas such as video games and robotics. However, ensuring safety and stability, which are two critical properties from a control perspective, remains a…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-10-02 Liqun Zhao , Konstantinos Gatsis , Antonis Papachristodoulou

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

Reinforcement learning is a general methodology of adaptive optimal control that has attracted much attention in various fields ranging from video game industry to robot manipulators. Despite its remarkable performance demonstrations, plain…

Dynamical Systems · Mathematics 2022-06-14 Pavel Osinenko , Grigory Yaremenko , Ilya Osokin

We propose a novel framework for risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RSRL) that incorporates robustness against transition uncertainty. We define two distinct yet coupled risk measures: an inner risk measure addressing state and cost…

Risk Management · Quantitative Finance 2026-01-01 Shanyu Han , Yangbo He , Yang Liu

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

We study optimality for the safety-constrained Markov decision process which is the underlying framework for safe reinforcement learning. Specifically, we consider a constrained Markov decision process (with finite states and finite…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-07-13 Rahul Misra , Rafał Wisniewski , Carsten Skovmose Kallesøe

An off policy reinforcement learning based control strategy is developed for the optimal tracking control problem to achieve the prescribed performance of full states during the learning process. The optimal tracking control problem is…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-09-02 C. Li , Y. Wang , F. Liu , M. Buss

Ensuring the safe exploration of reinforcement learning (RL) agents is critical for deployment in real-world systems. Yet existing approaches struggle to strike the right balance: methods that tightly enforce safety often cripple task…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-19 Daniel Bethell , Simos Gerasimou , Radu Calinescu , Calum Imrie

Due to the nature of risk management in learning applicable policies, risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RSRL) has been realized as an important direction. RSRL is usually achieved by learning risk-sensitive objectives characterized by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Ruiwen Zhou , Minghuan Liu , Kan Ren , Xufang Luo , Weinan Zhang , Dongsheng Li

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

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) for robotic systems requires policies that improve task performance while satisfying state and input constraints during both training and deployment. Control barrier functions (CBFs) provide a principled…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Dhruv S. Kushwaha , Zoleikha A. Biron

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is essentially a trial-and-error learning procedure which may cause unsafe behavior during the exploration-and-exploitation process. This hinders the application of RL to real-world control problems, especially…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-03 Yutong Li , Nan Li , H. Eric Tseng , Anouck Girard , Dimitar Filev , Ilya Kolmanovsky

We investigate the important problem of certifying stability of reinforcement learning policies when interconnected with nonlinear dynamical systems. We show that by regulating the input-output gradients of policies, strong guarantees of…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2018-10-30 Ming Jin , Javad Lavaei

While learning-based control techniques often outperform classical controller designs, safety requirements limit the acceptance of such methods in many applications. Recent developments address this issue through so-called predictive safety…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-05-16 Kim P. Wabersich , Melanie N. Zeilinger

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) is suitable for safety-critical domains where online exploration is too costly or dangerous. In such safety-critical settings, decision-making should take into consideration the risk of catastrophic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Marc Rigter , Bruno Lacerda , Nick Hawes

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has enabled vast performance improvements for robotics systems. To achieve these results though, the agent often must randomly explore the environment, which for safety critical systems presents a significant…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-05-12 Eric Squires , Phillip Odom , Zsolt Kira

This paper delves into the problem of safe reinforcement learning (RL) in a partially observable environment with the aim of achieving safe-reachability objectives. In traditional partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDP),…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-04 Xiaoyuan Cheng , Boli Chen , Liz Varga , Yukun Hu

This paper proposes a safe reinforcement learning (RL) framework based on forward-invariance-induced action-space design. The control problem is cast as a Markov decision process, but instead of relying on runtime shielding or penalty-based…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-04-10 Chieh Tsai , Muhammad Junayed Hasan Zahed , Salim Hariri , Hossein Rastgoftar