English
Related papers

Related papers: Do No Harm: A Counterfactual Approach to Safe Rein…

200 papers

We study a security threat to reinforcement learning where an attacker poisons the learning environment to force the agent into executing a target policy chosen by the attacker. As a victim, we consider RL agents whose objective is to find…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-20 Amin Rakhsha , Goran Radanovic , Rati Devidze , Xiaojin Zhu , Adish Singla

The alignment of autonomous agents with human values is a pivotal challenge when deploying these agents within physical environments, where safety is an important concern. However, defining the agent's objective as a reward and/or cost…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-15 Mattijs Baert , Sam Leroux , Pieter Simoens

The classic Reinforcement Learning (RL) formulation concerns the maximization of a scalar reward function. More recently, convex RL has been introduced to extend the RL formulation to all the objectives that are convex functions of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-30 Mirco Mutti , Riccardo De Santi , Piersilvio De Bartolomeis , Marcello Restelli

Safety is critical to broadening the application of reinforcement learning (RL). Often, we train RL agents in a controlled environment, such as a laboratory, before deploying them in the real world. However, the real-world target task might…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-22 Qisong Yang , Thiago D. Simão , Nils Jansen , Simon H. Tindemans , Matthijs T. J. Spaan

This paper proposes an on-policy reinforcement learning (RL) control algorithm that solves the optimal regulation problem for a class of uncertain continuous-time nonlinear systems under user-defined state constraints. We formulate the safe…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-09-20 Soutrik Bandyopadhyay , Shubhendu Bhasin

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have been successfully applied to control tasks associated with unmanned aerial vehicles and robotics. In recent years, safe RL has been proposed to allow the safe execution of RL algorithms in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Austin Coursey , Marcos Quinones-Grueiro , Gautam Biswas

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 has emerged as a promising methodology for training robot controllers. However, most results have been limited to simulation due to the need for a large number of samples and the lack of automated-yet-safe data…

Robotics · Computer Science 2018-03-29 Kendall Lowrey , Svetoslav Kolev , Jeremy Dao , Aravind Rajeswaran , Emanuel Todorov

We propose Convex Constraint Learning for Reinforcement Learning (CoCoRL), a novel approach for inferring shared constraints in a Constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP) from a set of safe demonstrations with possibly different reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-05 David Lindner , Xin Chen , Sebastian Tschiatschek , Katja Hofmann , Andreas Krause

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown great promise in domains like healthcare and robotics but often struggles with adoption due to its lack of interpretability. Counterfactual explanations, which address "what if" scenarios, provide a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Shuyang Dong , Shangtong Zhang , Lu Feng

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms aim to learn optimal decisions in unknown environments through experience of taking actions and observing the rewards gained. In some cases, the environment is not influenced by the actions of the RL…

Reinforcement learning (RL) agents with pre-specified reward functions cannot provide guaranteed safety across variety of circumstances that an uncertain system might encounter. To guarantee performance while assuring satisfaction of safety…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-04-20 Aquib Mustafa , Majid Mazouchi , Subramanya Nageshrao , Hamidreza Modares

Reinforcement learning (RL) combines a control problem with statistical estimation: The system dynamics are not known to the agent, but can be learned through experience. A recent line of research casts `RL as inference' and suggests a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-05 Brendan O'Donoghue , Ian Osband , Catalin Ionescu

Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents can solve diverse tasks but often exhibit unsafe behavior. Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs) address this by enforcing safety constraints, yet existing methods either sacrifice reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-18 Nikola Milosevic , Johannes Müller , Nico Scherf

Merely pursuing performance may adversely affect the safety, while a conservative policy for safe exploration will degrade the performance. How to balance the safety and performance in learning-based control problems is an interesting yet…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-01-28 Xinyang Wang , Hongwei Zhang , Shimin Wang , Wei Xiao , Martin Guay

The primary goal of reinforcement learning is to develop decision-making policies that prioritize optimal performance, frequently without considering safety. In contrast, safe reinforcement learning seeks to reduce or avoid unsafe behavior.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Zahra Shahrooei , Ali Baheri

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

A promising paradigm for offline reinforcement learning (RL) is to constrain the learned policy to stay close to the dataset behaviors, known as policy constraint offline RL. However, existing works heavily rely on the purity of the data,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-20 Chengqian Gao , Ke Xu , Liu Liu , Deheng Ye , Peilin Zhao , Zhiqiang Xu

Reinforcement Learning (RL) controllers have generated excitement within the control community. The primary advantage of RL controllers relative to existing methods is their ability to optimize uncertain systems independently of explicit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-07 Max Mowbray , Panagiotis Petsagkourakis , Ehecatl Antonio del Río Chanona , Dongda Zhang

Reinforcement learning policies are typically represented by black-box neural networks, which are non-interpretable and not well-suited for safety-critical domains. To address both of these issues, we propose constrained normalizing flow…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-03 Finn Rietz , Erik Schaffernicht , Stefan Heinrich , Johannes A. Stork