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Autonomous driving has achieved significant progress in recent years, but autonomous cars are still unable to tackle high-risk situations where a potential accident is likely. In such near-accident scenarios, even a minor change in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-02 Zhangjie Cao , Erdem Bıyık , Woodrow Z. Wang , Allan Raventos , Adrien Gaidon , Guy Rosman , Dorsa Sadigh

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

Reinforcement learning (RL) is an innovative approach to financial decision making, offering specialized solutions to complex investment problems where traditional methods fail. This review analyzes 167 articles from 2017--2025, focusing on…

Computational Finance · Quantitative Finance 2025-12-12 Mohammad Rezoanul Hoque , Md Meftahul Ferdaus , M. Kabir Hassan

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) agents need to be robust to variations in safety-critical environments. While system identification methods provide a way to infer the variation from online experience, they can fail in settings where fast…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-07 Annie Xie , Shagun Sodhani , Chelsea Finn , Joelle Pineau , Amy Zhang

One typical assumption in inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) is that human experts act to optimize the expected utility of a stochastic cost with a fixed distribution. This assumption deviates from actual human behaviors under ambiguity.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-25 Rui Chen , Wenshuo Wang , Zirui Zhao , Ding Zhao

Modern navigation algorithms based on deep reinforcement learning (RL) show promising efficiency and robustness. However, most deep RL algorithms operate in a risk-neutral manner, making no special attempt to shield users from relatively…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-12 Jinyoung Choi , Christopher R. Dance , Jung-eun Kim , Seulbin Hwang , Kyung-sik Park

We propose a metalearning approach for learning gradient-based reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. The idea is to evolve a differentiable loss function, such that an agent, which optimizes its policy to minimize this loss, will achieve…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-05-01 Rein Houthooft , Richard Y. Chen , Phillip Isola , Bradly C. Stadie , Filip Wolski , Jonathan Ho , Pieter Abbeel

Ensuring the safety of Reinforcement Learning (RL) is crucial for its deployment in real-world applications. Nevertheless, managing the trade-off between reward and safety during exploration presents a significant challenge. Improving…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Shangding Gu , Bilgehan Sel , Yuhao Ding , Lu Wang , Qingwei Lin , Ming Jin , Alois Knoll

This paper deals with distributed policy optimization in reinforcement learning, which involves a central controller and a group of learners. In particular, two typical settings encountered in several applications are considered:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-21 Tianyi Chen , Kaiqing Zhang , Georgios B. Giannakis , Tamer Başar

Safe reinforcement learning (SafeRL) is a prominent paradigm for autonomous driving, where agents are required to optimize performance under strict safety requirements. This dual objective creates a fundamental tension, as overly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-24 Mahesh Keswani , Raunak Bhattacharyya

We develop a framework for interacting with uncertain environments in reinforcement learning (RL) by leveraging preferences in the form of utility functions. We claim that there is value in considering different risk measures during…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-23 Hannes Eriksson , Christos Dimitrakakis

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a framework to optimize a control policy using rewards that are revealed by the system as a response to a control action. In its standard form, RL involves a single agent that uses its policy to accomplish a…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-11-24 Juan Cervino , Juan Andres Bazerque , Miguel Calvo-Fullana , Alejandro Ribeiro

Ensuring safety of nonlinear systems under model uncertainty and external disturbances is crucial, especially for real-world control tasks. Predictive methods such as robust model predictive control (RMPC) require solving nonconvex…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-11-14 Zeyang Li , Chuxiong Hu , Weiye Zhao , Changliu Liu

We present an off-policy actor-critic algorithm for Reinforcement Learning (RL) that combines ideas from gradient-free optimization via stochastic search with learned action-value function. The result is a simple procedure consisting of…

Reinforcement learning (RL) presents a promising framework to learn policies through environment interaction, but often requires an infeasible amount of interaction data to solve complex tasks from sparse rewards. One direction includes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-07 Stone Tao , Arth Shukla , Tse-kai Chan , Hao Su

One major obstacle that precludes the success of reinforcement learning in real-world applications is the lack of robustness, either to model uncertainties or external disturbances, of the trained policies. Robustness is critical when the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-05 Rahul Singh , Qinsheng Zhang , Yongxin Chen

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

Online reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are often difficult to deploy in complex human-facing applications as they may learn slowly and have poor early performance. To address this, we introduce a practical algorithm for incorporating…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-01-03 Tong Mu , Georgios Theocharous , David Arbour , Emma Brunskill

This paper considers the problem of solving constrained reinforcement learning (RL) problems with anytime guarantees, meaning that the algorithmic solution must yield a constraint-satisfying policy at every iteration of its evolution. Our…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-10-03 Pol Mestres , Arnau Marzabal , Jorge Cortés