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Reinforcement learning algorithms are typically geared towards optimizing the expected return of an agent. However, in many practical applications, low variance in the return is desired to ensure the reliability of an algorithm. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-04 Arushi Jain , Gandharv Patil , Ayush Jain , Khimya Khetarpal , Doina Precup

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

We introduce an offline reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm that explicitly clones a behavior policy to constrain value learning. In offline RL, it is often important to prevent a policy from selecting unobserved actions, since the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-03 Wonjoon Goo , Scott Niekum

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

Safety is one of the main challenges in applying reinforcement learning to realistic environmental tasks. To ensure safety during and after training process, existing methods tend to adopt overly conservative policy to avoid unsafe…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-27 Xiao Zhang , Hai Zhang , Hongtu Zhou , Chang Huang , Di Zhang , Chen Ye , Junqiao Zhao

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are often categorized as either on-policy or off-policy depending on whether they use data from a target policy of interest or from a different behavior policy. In this paper, we study a subtle…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-12 Rujie Zhong , Duohan Zhang , Lukas Schäfer , Stefano V. Albrecht , Josiah P. Hanna

We study a class of constrained reinforcement learning (RL) problems in which multiple constraint specifications are not identified before training. It is challenging to identify appropriate constraint specifications due to the undefined…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-01-02 Dongsheng Ding , Zhengyan Huan , Alejandro Ribeiro

Sample efficiency and exploration remain major challenges in online reinforcement learning (RL). A powerful approach that can be applied to address these issues is the inclusion of offline data, such as prior trajectories from a human…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-01 Philip J. Ball , Laura Smith , Ilya Kostrikov , Sergey Levine

We study the efficient off-policy evaluation of natural stochastic policies, which are defined in terms of deviations from the behavior policy. This is a departure from the literature on off-policy evaluation where most work consider the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-05 Nathan Kallus , Masatoshi Uehara

The desire to use reinforcement learning in safety-critical settings has inspired a recent interest in formal methods for learning algorithms. Existing formal methods for learning and optimization primarily consider the problem of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-06-05 Nathan Fulton , Andre Platzer

Safety is a critical feature of controller design for physical systems. When designing control policies, several approaches to guarantee this aspect of autonomy have been proposed, such as robust controllers or control barrier functions.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-26 Miguel Calvo-Fullana , Luiz F. O. Chamon , Santiago Paternain

This article introduces an imitation learning method for learning maximum entropy policies that comply with constraints demonstrated by expert trajectories executing a task. The formulation of the method takes advantage of results…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-10 George Papadopoulos , George A. Vouros

In this paper we present a new way of predicting the performance of a reinforcement learning policy given historical data that may have been generated by a different policy. The ability to evaluate a policy from historical data is important…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-04-05 Philip S. Thomas , Emma Brunskill

We study the problem of off-policy value evaluation in reinforcement learning (RL), where one aims to estimate the value of a new policy based on data collected by a different policy. This problem is often a critical step when applying RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-05-27 Nan Jiang , Lihong Li

This paper addresses the problem of maintaining safety during training in Reinforcement Learning (RL), such that the safety constraint violations are bounded at any point during learning. In a variety of RL applications the safety of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-19 Rohan Mitta , Hosein Hasanbeig , Jun Wang , Daniel Kroening , Yiannis Kantaros , Alessandro Abate

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

Policy constraint methods in offline reinforcement learning employ additional regularization techniques to constrain the discrepancy between the learned policy and the offline dataset. However, these methods tend to result in overly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-06 Shirong Liu , Chenjia Bai , Zixian Guo , Hao Zhang , Gaurav Sharma , Yang Liu

Restricting the variance of a policy's return is a popular choice in risk-averse Reinforcement Learning (RL) due to its clear mathematical definition and easy interpretability. Traditional methods directly restrict the total return…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-06 Yudong Luo , Guiliang Liu , Pascal Poupart , Yangchen Pan

Robust reinforcement learning (RL) aims to find a policy that optimizes the worst-case performance in the face of uncertainties. In this paper, we focus on action robust RL with the probabilistic policy execution uncertainty, in which,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-21 Guanlin Liu , Zhihan Zhou , Han Liu , Lifeng Lai

Dealing with high variance is a significant challenge in model-free reinforcement learning (RL). Existing methods are unreliable, exhibiting high variance in performance from run to run using different initializations/seeds. Focusing on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-15 Richard Cheng , Abhinav Verma , Gabor Orosz , Swarat Chaudhuri , Yisong Yue , Joel W. Burdick