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Related papers: Decision-Point Guided Safe Policy Improvement

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Batch Reinforcement Learning (Batch RL) consists in training a policy using trajectories collected with another policy, called the behavioural policy. Safe policy improvement (SPI) provides guarantees with high probability that the trained…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-12 Kimia Nadjahi , Romain Laroche , Rémi Tachet des Combes

Safe policy improvement (SPI) offers theoretical control over policy updates, yet existing guarantees largely concern offline, tabular reinforcement learning (RL). We study SPI in general online settings, when combined with world model and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Florent Delgrange , Raphael Avalos , Willem Röpke

This paper considers Safe Policy Improvement (SPI) in Batch Reinforcement Learning (Batch RL): from a fixed dataset and without direct access to the true environment, train a policy that is guaranteed to perform at least as well as the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-11 Romain Laroche , Paul Trichelair , Rémi Tachet des Combes

In offline reinforcement learning (RL), we learn policies from fixed datasets without environment interaction. The major challenges are to provide guarantees on the (1) performance and (2) safety of the resulting policy. A technique called…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Maris F. L. Galesloot , Thomas Rhemrev , Nils Jansen

Safe policy improvement (SPI) is an offline reinforcement learning problem in which a new policy that reliably outperforms the behavior policy with high confidence needs to be computed using only a dataset and the behavior policy. Markov…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-08-20 Kasper Engelen , Guillermo A. Pérez , Marnix Suilen

In domains such as finance, healthcare, and robotics, managing worst-case scenarios is critical, as failure to do so can lead to catastrophic outcomes. Distributional Reinforcement Learning (DRL) provides a natural framework to incorporate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Mehrdad Moghimi , Hyejin Ku

We study the problem of Safe Policy Improvement (SPI) under constraints in the offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) setting. We consider the scenario where: (i) we have a dataset collected under a known baseline policy, (ii) multiple reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-01 Harsh Satija , Philip S. Thomas , Joelle Pineau , Romain Laroche

Safe Policy Improvement (SPI) aims at provable guarantees that a learned policy is at least approximately as good as a given baseline policy. Building on SPI with Soft Baseline Bootstrapping (Soft-SPIBB) by Nadjahi et al., we identify…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-02 Philipp Scholl , Felix Dietrich , Clemens Otte , Steffen Udluft

Safety is the priority concern when applying reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms to real-world control problems. While policy iteration provides a fundamental algorithm for standard RL, an analogous theoretical algorithm for safe RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-14 Yujie Yang , Zhilong Zheng , Shengbo Eben Li , Wei Xu , Jingjing Liu , Xianyuan Zhan , Ya-Qin Zhang

When modifying existing policies in high-risk settings, it is often necessary to ensure with high certainty that the newly proposed policy improves upon a baseline, such as the status quo. In this work, we consider the problem of safe…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-23 Brian M Cho , Ana-Roxana Pop , Kyra Gan , Sam Corbett-Davies , Israel Nir , Ariel Evnine , Nathan Kallus

Risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RL) is crucial for maintaining reliable performance in high-stakes applications. While traditional RL methods aim to learn a point estimate of the random cumulative cost, distributional RL (DRL) seeks…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-03 Minheng Xiao , Xian Yu , Lei Ying

Distributional reinforcement learning (DRL) is a recent reinforcement learning framework whose success has been supported by various empirical studies. It relies on the key idea of replacing the expected return with the return distribution,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-09 Rahul Singh , Keuntaek Lee , Yongxin Chen

We study safe policy improvement (SPI) for partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs). SPI is an offline reinforcement learning (RL) problem that assumes access to (1) historical data about an environment, and (2) the so-called…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-01-13 Thiago D. Simão , Marnix Suilen , Nils Jansen

Reinforcement learning (RL) in continuous state-action spaces remains challenging in scientific computing due to poor sample efficiency and lack of pathwise physical consistency. We introduce Differential Reinforcement Learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Minh Nguyen , Chandrajit Bajaj

In recent years significant progress has been made in dealing with challenging problems using reinforcement learning.Despite its great success, reinforcement learning still faces challenge in continuous control tasks. Conventional methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-04 Longxiang Shi , Shijian Li , Longbing Cao , Long Yang , Gang Zheng , Gang Pan

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

Standard reinforcement learning (RL) optimizes policies for reward but imposes few constraints on how decisions evolve over time. As a result, policies may achieve high performance while exhibiting temporally incoherent behavior such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-24 Sukesh Subaharan

Safe Policy Improvement (SPI) is an important technique for offline reinforcement learning in safety critical applications as it improves the behavior policy with a high probability. We classify various SPI approaches from the literature…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-02 Philipp Scholl , Felix Dietrich , Clemens Otte , Steffen Udluft

In this paper, we consider the important problem of safe exploration in reinforcement learning. While reinforcement learning is well-suited to domains with complex transition dynamics and high-dimensional state-action spaces, an additional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-02-05 Javier Garcia , Fernando Fernandez

Batch reinforcement learning (RL) is important to apply RL algorithms to many high stakes tasks. Doing batch RL in a way that yields a reliable new policy in large domains is challenging: a new decision policy may visit states and actions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-23 Yao Liu , Adith Swaminathan , Alekh Agarwal , Emma Brunskill
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