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Related papers: Safety through feedback in Constrained RL

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Most reinforcement learning (RL) approaches for the decision-making of autonomous driving consider safety as a reward instead of a cost, which makes it hard to balance the tradeoff between safety and other objectives. Human risk preference…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-03-05 Yang Li , Shijie Yuan , Yuan Chang , Xiaolong Chen , Qisong Yang , Zhiyuan Yang , Hongmao Qin

A key barrier to using reinforcement learning (RL) in many real-world applications is the requirement of a large number of system interactions to learn a good control policy. Off-policy and Offline RL methods have been proposed to reduce…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-02 Wenqi Cui , Linbin Huang , Weiwei Yang , Baosen Zhang

We extend the learning from demonstration paradigm by providing a method for learning unknown constraints shared across tasks, using demonstrations of the tasks, their cost functions, and knowledge of the system dynamics and control…

Robotics · Computer Science 2019-02-22 Glen Chou , Dmitry Berenson , Necmiye Ozay

In the field of safe reinforcement learning (RL), finding a balance between satisfying safety constraints and optimizing reward performance presents a significant challenge. A key obstacle in this endeavor is the estimation of safety…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-14 Zhepeng Cen , Yihang Yao , Zuxin Liu , Ding Zhao

Reward design remains a significant bottleneck in applying reinforcement learning (RL) to real-world problems. A popular alternative is reward learning, where reward functions are inferred from human feedback rather than manually specified.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-16 Chaitanya Kharyal , Calarina Muslimani , Matthew E. Taylor

Autonomous highway driving demands a critical balance between proactive, efficiency-seeking behavior and robust safety guarantees. This paper proposes Language Action-guided Reinforcement Learning (LA-RL) with Safety Guarantees, a novel…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-12-08 Yiming Shu , Jiahui Xu , Jiwei Tang , Ruiyang Gao , Chen Sun

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

Reinforcement learning (RL) requires skillful definition and remarkable computational efforts to solve optimization and control problems, which could impair its prospect. Introducing human guidance into reinforcement learning is a promising…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-30 Jingda Wu , Zhiyu Huang , Wenhui Huang , Chen Lv

Many real-world combinatorial problems involve uncertain parameters, which can be predicted given contextual features and historical data. These `predict-then-optimize' or `contextual optimization' problems have gained significant…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Noah Schutte , Senne Berden , Tias Guns , Krzysztof Postek , Neil Yorke-Smith

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

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

Decision-making is critical for lane change in autonomous driving. Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms aim to identify the values of behaviors in various situations and thus they become a promising pathway to address the decision-making…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-07-08 Jingda Wu , Wenhui Huang , Niels de Boer , Yanghui Mo , Xiangkun He , Chen Lv

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has made notable success in decision-making fields like autonomous driving and robotic manipulation. Yet, its reliance on real-time feedback poses challenges in costly or hazardous settings. Furthermore, RL's…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-19 Minjae Cho , Chuangchuang Sun

This paper proposes tackling safety-critical stochastic Reinforcement Learning (RL) tasks with a sample-based, model-based approach. At the core of the method lies a Model Predictive Control (MPC) scheme that acts as function approximation,…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-07-30 Filippo Airaldi , Bart De Schutter , Azita Dabiri

Standard reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms assume that the observation of the next state comes instantaneously and at no cost. In a wide variety of sequential decision making tasks ranging from medical treatment to scientific…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-05-27 Colin Bellinger , Rory Coles , Mark Crowley , Isaac Tamblyn

In safety-critical domains, reinforcement learning (RL) agents must often satisfy strict, zero-cost safety constraints while accomplishing tasks. Existing model-free methods frequently either fail to achieve near-zero safety violations or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Dominik Wagner , Ankit Kanwar , Luke Ong

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a general framework concerned with an agent that seeks to maximize rewards in an environment. The learning typically happens through trial and error using explorative methods, such as epsilon-greedy. There are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-06 Per-Arne Andersen , Morten Goodwin , Ole-Christoffer Granmo

In this work, we present an approach to learn cost maps for driving in complex urban environments from a very large number of demonstrations of driving behaviour by human experts. The learned cost maps are constructed directly from raw…

Robotics · Computer Science 2016-07-11 Markus Wulfmeier , Dominic Zeng Wang , Ingmar Posner

Reinforcement learning (RL) for robotics is challenging due to the difficulty in hand-engineering a dense cost function, which can lead to unintended behavior, and dynamical uncertainty, which makes exploration and constraint satisfaction…

The safety constraints commonly used by existing safe reinforcement learning (RL) methods are defined only on expectation of initial states, but allow each certain state to be unsafe, which is unsatisfying for real-world safety-critical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-15 Haitong Ma , Yang Guan , Shegnbo Eben Li , Xiangteng Zhang , Sifa Zheng , Jianyu Chen