English
Related papers

Related papers: Leveraging Approximate Model-based Shielding for P…

200 papers

A longstanding goal in safe reinforcement learning (RL) is a method to ensure the safety of a policy throughout the entire process, from learning to operation. However, existing safe RL paradigms inherently struggle to achieve this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Akifumi Wachi , Kohei Miyaguchi , Takumi Tanabe , Rei Sato , Youhei Akimoto

Designing Reinforcement Learning (RL) solutions for real-life problems remains a significant challenge. A major area of concern is safety. "Shielding" is a popular technique to enforce safety in RL by turning user-defined safety…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-31 Alexander Politowicz , Sahisnu Mazumder , Bing Liu

The desire to use reinforcement learning in safety-critical settings has inspired a recent interest in formal methods for learning algorithms. Existing formal methods for learning and optimization primarily consider the problem of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-06-05 Nathan Fulton , Andre Platzer

Safety is a critical component of autonomous systems and remains a challenge for learning-based policies to be utilized in the real world. In particular, policies learned using reinforcement learning often fail to generalize to novel…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-04-04 Kai-Chieh Hsu , Allen Z. Ren , Duy Phuong Nguyen , Anirudha Majumdar , Jaime F. Fisac

It is challenging to use reinforcement learning (RL) in cyber-physical systems due to the lack of safety guarantees during learning. Although there have been various proposals to reduce undesired behaviors during learning, most of these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-28 Masaki Waga , Ezequiel Castellano , Sasinee Pruekprasert , Stefan Klikovits , Toru Takisaka , Ichiro Hasuo

This paper addresses the problem of maintaining safety during training in Reinforcement Learning (RL), such that the safety constraint violations are bounded at any point during learning. In a variety of RL applications the safety of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-19 Rohan Mitta , Hosein Hasanbeig , Jun Wang , Daniel Kroening , Yiannis Kantaros , Alessandro Abate

Safe exploration remains a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), limiting the deployment of RL agents in the real world. We propose Sampling-Based Safe Reinforcement Learning (SBSRL), a model-based RL algorithm that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Luca Vignola , Bruce D. Lee , Manish Prajapat , Manuel Wendl , Melanie Zeilinger , Andreas Krause , Yarden As

Safe reinforcement learning is a promising path toward applying reinforcement learning algorithms to real-world problems, where suboptimal behaviors may lead to actual negative consequences. In this work, we focus on the setting where…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-17 Garrett Thomas , Yuping Luo , Tengyu Ma

While Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has achieved remarkable success across various domains, it remains vulnerable to occasional catastrophic failures without additional safeguards. An effective solution to prevent these failures is to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-03 Kyungmin Kim , Davide Corsi , Andoni Rodriguez , JB Lanier , Benjami Parellada , Pierre Baldi , Cesar Sanchez , Roy Fox

The increasing adoption of Reinforcement Learning in safety-critical systems domains such as autonomous vehicles, health, and aviation raises the need for ensuring their safety. Existing safety mechanisms such as adversarial training,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-11 Paulina Stevia Nouwou Mindom , Amin Nikanjam , Foutse Khomh , John Mullins

Empowering safe exploration of reinforcement learning (RL) agents during training is a critical challenge towards their deployment in many real-world scenarios. When prior knowledge of the domain or task is unavailable, training RL agents…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-08-27 Daniel Bethell , Simos Gerasimou , Radu Calinescu , Calum Imrie

Despite the extent of recent advances in Machine Learning (ML) and Neural Networks, providing formal guarantees on the behavior of these systems is still an open problem, and a crucial requirement for their adoption in regulated or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-01 Matteo Francobaldi , Michele Lombardi

Reachability computations that rely on learned or estimated models require calibration in order to uphold confidence about their guarantees. Calibration generally involves sampling scenarios inside the reachable set. However, producing…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-03-27 Sampada Deglurkar , Ebonye Smith , Jingqi Li , Claire J. Tomlin

Unseen shifts in environment dynamics, driven by hidden parameters such as friction or gravity, create a challenge for maintaining safety. We address this challenge by proposing Adaptive Shielding, a framework for safe reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Minjae Kwon , Tyler Ingebrand , Ufuk Topcu , Lu Feng

A major challenge to deploying cyber-physical systems with learning-enabled controllers is to ensure their safety, especially in the face of changing environments that necessitate runtime knowledge acquisition. Model-checking and automated…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2025-02-27 Yao Feng , Jun Zhu , André Platzer , Jonathan Laurent

Safety is still one of the major research challenges in reinforcement learning (RL). In this paper, we address the problem of how to avoid safety violations of RL agents during exploration in probabilistic and partially unknown…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-06 Martin Tappler , Stefan Pranger , Bettina Könighofer , Edi Muškardin , Roderick Bloem , Kim Larsen

Reinforcement learning (RL) agents need to explore their environments in order to learn optimal policies. In many environments and tasks, safety is of critical importance. The widespread use of simulators offers a number of advantages,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-03-01 Luka Kovač , Igor Farkaš

Ensuring the safety of language models (LMs) while maintaining their usefulness remains a critical challenge in AI alignment. Current approaches rely on sequential adversarial training: generating adversarial prompts and fine-tuning LMs to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Anselm Paulus , Ilia Kulikov , Brandon Amos , Rémi Munos , Ivan Evtimov , Kamalika Chaudhuri , Arman Zharmagambetov

Ensuring safety in Reinforcement Learning (RL), typically framed as a Constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP), is crucial for real-world exploration applications. Current approaches in handling CMDP struggle to balance optimality and…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-03-07 Zhaorun Chen , Zhuokai Zhao , Tairan He , Binhao Chen , Xuhao Zhao , Liang Gong , Chengliang Liu

Real-world reinforcement learning (RL) problems often demand that agents behave safely by obeying a set of designed constraints. We address the challenge of safe RL by coupling a safety guide based on model predictive control (MPC) with a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-30 Samuel Pfrommer , Tanmay Gautam , Alec Zhou , Somayeh Sojoudi