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Related papers: Policy Bifurcation in Safe Reinforcement Learning

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Safety is an indispensable requirement for applying reinforcement learning (RL) to real problems. Although there has been a surge of safe RL algorithms proposed in recent years, most existing work typically 1) relies on receiving numeric…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-12 Akifumi Wachi , Wataru Hashimoto , Kazumune Hashimoto

Safety in reinforcement learning (RL) is a key property in both training and execution in many domains such as autonomous driving or finance. In this paper, we formalize it with a constrained RL formulation in the distributional RL setting.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-01 Jianyi Zhang , Paul Weng

One of the key challenges to deep reinforcement learning (deep RL) is to ensure safety at both training and testing phases. In this work, we propose a novel technique of unsupervised action planning to improve the safety of on-policy…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-09-30 Hao-Lun Hsu , Qiuhua Huang , Sehoon Ha

Constrained reinforcement learning (CRL) has gained significant interest recently, since safety constraints satisfaction is critical for real-world problems. However, existing CRL methods constraining discounted cumulative costs generally…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-08 Dongjie Yu , Haitong Ma , Shengbo Eben Li , Jianyu Chen

We consider the challenge of policy simplification and verification in the context of policies learned through reinforcement learning (RL) in continuous environments. In well-behaved settings, RL algorithms have convergence guarantees in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-15 Florent Delgrange , Ann Nowé , Guillermo A. Pérez

Reinforcement learning (RL) policies often fail under dynamics that differ from training, a gap not fully addressed by domain randomization or existing adversarial RL methods. Distributionally robust RL provides a formal remedy but still…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Mintae Kim , Koushil Sreenath

Model-free or learning-based control, in particular, reinforcement learning (RL), is expected to be applied for complex robotic tasks. Traditional RL requires a policy to be optimized is state-dependent, that means, the policy is a kind of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-09 Taisuke Kobayashi , Kenta Yoshizawa

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has proven highly effective in addressing complex control and decision-making tasks. However, in most traditional RL algorithms, the policy is typically parameterized as a diagonal Gaussian distribution, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Ruijie Hao , Longfei Zhang , Yang Dai , Yang Ma , Xingxing Liang , Guangquan Cheng

Safe exploration is a key to applying reinforcement learning (RL) in safety-critical systems. Existing safe exploration methods guaranteed safety under the assumption of regularity, and it has been difficult to apply them to large-scale…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-10 Akifumi Wachi , Yunyue Wei , Yanan Sui

We consider the problem of finding optimal policies for a Markov Decision Process with almost sure constraints on state transitions and action triplets. We define value and action-value functions that satisfy a barrier-based decomposition…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-25 Agustin Castellano , Juan Bazerque , Enrique Mallada

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been shown to be effective in many scenarios. However, it typically requires the exploration of a sufficiently large number of state-action pairs, some of which may be unsafe. Consequently, its application to…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-06-24 Yousef Emam , Gennaro Notomista , Paul Glotfelter , Zsolt Kira , Magnus Egerstedt

Recent advances in deep reinforcement learning (RL) have achieved strong results on high-dimensional control tasks, but applying RL to reachability problems raises a fundamental mismatch: reachability seeks to maximize the set of states…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-18 Oswin So , Eric Yang Yu , Songyuan Zhang , Matthew Cleaveland , Mitchell Black , Chuchu Fan

Meta reinforcement learning (RL) allows agents to leverage experience across a distribution of tasks on which the agent can train at will, enabling faster learning of optimal policies on new test tasks. Despite its success in improving…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Tingting Ni , Maryam Kamgarpour

Reinforcement learning (RL) has proven to be particularly effective in solving complex decision-making problems for a wide range of applications. Safe reinforcement learning refers to a class of constrained problems where the constraint…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-05-13 Dhruv Singh Kushwaha , Zoleikha Abdollahi Biron

Navigating urban environments represents a complex task for automated vehicles. They must reach their goal safely and efficiently while considering a multitude of traffic participants. We propose a modular decision making algorithm to…

Robotics · Computer Science 2019-04-26 Maxime Bouton , Alireza Nakhaei , Kikuo Fujimura , Mykel J. Kochenderfer

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising optimal control technique for multi-energy management systems. It does not require a model a priori - reducing the upfront and ongoing project-specific engineering effort and is capable of learning…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-09-02 Glenn Ceusters , Luis Ramirez Camargo , Rüdiger Franke , Ann Nowé , Maarten Messagie

This paper proposes a novel robust reinforcement learning framework for discrete-time linear systems with model mismatch that may arise from the sim-to-real gap. A key strategy is to invoke advanced techniques from control theory. Using the…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-12-07 Leilei Cui , Tamer Başar , Zhong-Ping Jiang

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) trains a policy to maximize the task reward while satisfying safety constraints. While prior works focus on the performance optimality, we find that the optimal solutions of many safe RL problems are not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-03 Zuxin Liu , Zijian Guo , Zhepeng Cen , Huan Zhang , Jie Tan , Bo Li , Ding Zhao

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn decision policies from a fixed batch of logged transitions, without additional environment interaction. Despite remarkable empirical progress, offline RL remains fragile under distribution…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-03-16 Debashis Chatterjee

An emerging field of sequential decision problems is safe Reinforcement Learning (RL), where the objective is to maximize the reward while obeying safety constraints. Being able to handle constraints is essential for deploying RL agents in…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-03-08 Nick Bührer , Zhejun Zhang , Alexander Liniger , Fisher Yu , Luc Van Gool