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Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful framework for optimal decision-making and control but often lacks provable guarantees for safety-critical applications. In this paper, we introduce a novel recovery-based shielding framework that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-18 Alexander W. Goodall , Francesco Belardinelli

A reinforcement learning (RL) control policy could fail in a new/perturbed environment that is different from the training environment, due to the presence of dynamic variations. For controlling systems with continuous state and action…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-08-31 Y. Cheng , P. Zhao , F. Wang , D. J. Block , N. Hovakimyan

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

Despite recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL), its application in safety critical domains like autonomous vehicles is still challenging. Although punishing RL agents for risky situations can help to learn safe policies, it may also…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-07-16 Danial Kamran , Tizian Engelgeh , Marvin Busch , Johannes Fischer , Christoph Stiller

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) is a subfield of machine learning for training autonomous agents that take sequential actions across complex environments. Despite its significant performance in well-known environments, it remains…

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

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

Attacks on machine learning models have been extensively studied through stateless optimization. In this paper, we demonstrate how a reinforcement learning (RL) agent can learn a new class of attack algorithms that generate adversarial…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-11-20 Kyle Domico , Jean-Charles Noirot Ferrand , Ryan Sheatsley , Eric Pauley , Josiah Hanna , Patrick McDaniel

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

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

The growing trend of fledgling reinforcement learning systems making their way into real-world applications has been accompanied by growing concerns for their safety and robustness. In recent years, a variety of approaches have been put…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-03 Chloe He , Borja G. Leon , Francesco Belardinelli

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) agents frequently face challenges in adapting to tasks outside their training distribution, including issues with over-fitting, catastrophic forgetting and sample inefficiency. Although the application of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-11-21 Yizhao Jin , Greg Slabaugh , Simon Lucas

In safety-critical applications, autonomous agents may need to learn in an environment where mistakes can be very costly. In such settings, the agent needs to behave safely not only after but also while learning. To achieve this, existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-22 Matteo Turchetta , Andrey Kolobov , Shital Shah , Andreas Krause , Alekh Agarwal

Agent decision making using Reinforcement Learning (RL) heavily relies on either a model or simulator of the environment (e.g., moving in an 8x8 maze with three rooms, playing Chess on an 8x8 board). Due to this dependence, small changes in…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-09-20 Wenjun Li , Pradeep Varakantham , Dexun Li

Safe reinforcement learning (Safe RL) seeks to maximize rewards while satisfying safety constraints, typically addressed through Lagrangian-based methods. However, existing approaches, including PID and classical Lagrangian methods, suffer…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Mingxu Zhang , Huicheng Zhang , Jiaming Ji , Yaodong Yang , Ying Sun

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

We tackle the blackbox issue of deep neural networks in the settings of reinforcement learning (RL) where neural agents learn towards maximizing reward gains in an uncontrollable way. Such learning approach is risky when the interacting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-13 John Yang , Gyujeong Lee , Minsung Hyun , Simyung Chang , Nojun Kwak

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

Deep reinforcement learning has proven remarkably useful in training agents from unstructured data. However, the opacity of the produced agents makes it difficult to ensure that they adhere to various requirements posed by human engineers.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-10 Raz Yerushalmi , Guy Amir , Achiya Elyasaf , David Harel , Guy Katz , Assaf Marron

Safety is a crucial necessity in many applications of reinforcement learning (RL), whether robotic, automotive, or medical. Many existing approaches to safe RL rely on receiving numeric safety feedback, but in many cases this feedback can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-27 Andrew Bennett , Dipendra Misra , Nathan Kallus