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End-to-end models for autonomous driving hold the promise of learning complex behaviors directly from sensor data, but face critical challenges in safety and handling long-tail events. Reinforcement Learning (RL) offers a promising path to…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-12 Tianyi Yan , Tao Tang , Xingtai Gui , Yongkang Li , Jiasen Zhesng , Weiyao Huang , Lingdong Kong , Wencheng Han , Xia Zhou , Xueyang Zhang , Yifei Zhan , Kun Zhan , Cheng-zhong Xu , Jianbing Shen

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a promising approach for achieving autonomous driving due to robust decision-making capabilities. RL learns a driving policy through trial and error in traffic scenarios, guided by a reward function that…

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

Reinforcement learning (RL) has revolutionized decision-making across a wide range of domains over the past few decades. Yet, deploying RL policies in real-world scenarios presents the crucial challenge of ensuring safety. Traditional safe…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-03-26 Lunet Yifru , Ali Baheri

Offline safe reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising approach for learning safe behaviors without engaging in risky online interactions with the environment. Most existing methods in offline safe RL rely on cost constraints…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-22 Ze Gong , Akshat Kumar , Pradeep Varakantham

Safety is a critical hurdle that limits the application of deep reinforcement learning (RL) to real-world control tasks. To this end, constrained reinforcement learning leverages cost functions to improve safety in constrained Markov…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-26 Tairan He , Weiye Zhao , Changliu Liu

Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown promise as a tool for engineering safe, ethical, or legal behaviour in autonomous agents. Its use typically relies on assigning punishments to state-action pairs that constitute unsafe or unethical…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-04-20 Emery Neufeld

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

Reinforcement learning provides an appealing framework for robotic control due to its ability to learn expressive policies purely through real-world interaction. However, this requires addressing real-world constraints and avoiding…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-05-09 Kyle Stachowicz , Sergey Levine

Traditional control theory-based methods require tailored engineering for each system and constant fine-tuning. In power plant control, one often needs to obtain a precise representation of the system dynamics and carefully design the…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-09-21 Yixuan Sun , Sami Khairy , Richard B. Vilim , Rui Hu , Akshay J. Dave

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms usually require a substantial amount of interaction data and perform well only for specific tasks in a fixed environment. In some scenarios such as healthcare, however, usually only few records are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-17 Chaochao Lu , Biwei Huang , Ke Wang , José Miguel Hernández-Lobato , Kun Zhang , Bernhard Schölkopf

We develop provably safe and convergent reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms for control of nonlinear dynamical systems, bridging the gap between the hard safety guarantees of control theory and the convergence guarantees of RL theory.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-08 Wesley A. Suttle , Vipul K. Sharma , Krishna C. Kosaraju , S. Sivaranjani , Ji Liu , Vijay Gupta , Brian M. Sadler

Regardless of the particular task we want them to perform in an environment, there are often shared safety constraints we want our agents to respect. For example, regardless of whether it is making a sandwich or clearing the table, a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-06 Konwoo Kim , Gokul Swamy , Zuxin Liu , Ding Zhao , Sanjiban Choudhury , Zhiwei Steven Wu

Constrained Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims to maximize the return while adhering to predefined constraint limits, which represent domain-specific safety requirements. In continuous control settings, where learning agents govern system…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-12 Somnath Hazra , Pallab Dasgupta , Soumyajit Dey

Autonomous vehicles inevitably encounter a vast array of scenarios in real-world environments. Addressing long-tail scenarios, particularly those involving intensive interactions with numerous traffic participants, remains one of the most…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-12-16 Guanzhou Li , Jianping Wu , Yujing He

It is quite challenging to ensure the safety of reinforcement learning (RL) agents in an unknown and stochastic environment under hard constraints that require the system state not to reach certain specified unsafe regions. Many popular…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-06-14 Yixuan Wang , Simon Sinong Zhan , Ruochen Jiao , Zhilu Wang , Wanxin Jin , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang , Chao Huang , Qi Zhu

Reinforcement learning (RL) enables agents to learn optimal behaviors through interaction with their environment and has been increasingly deployed in safety-critical applications, including autonomous driving. Despite its promise, RL is…

Modern reinforcement learning (RL) systems capture deep truths about general, human problem-solving. In domains where new data can be simulated cheaply, these systems uncover sequential decision-making policies that far exceed the ability…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Scott Jeen

We consider the safe reinforcement learning (RL) problem of maximizing utility with extremely low constraint violation rates. Assuming no prior knowledge or pre-training of the environment safety model given a task, an agent has to learn,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-12 Haonan Yu , Wei Xu , Haichao Zhang

This paper studies the constrained/safe reinforcement learning (RL) problem with sparse indicator signals for constraint violations. We propose a model-based approach to enable RL agents to effectively explore the environment with unknown…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-03-09 Zuxin Liu , Hongyi Zhou , Baiming Chen , Sicheng Zhong , Martial Hebert , Ding Zhao