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Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown a promising performance in learning optimal policies for a variety of sequential decision-making tasks. However, in many real-world RL problems, besides optimizing the main objectives, the agent is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-30 Ashkan B. Jeddi , Nariman L. Dehghani , Abdollah Shafieezadeh

Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) learns a reward function to explain expert demonstrations. Modern IRL methods often use the adversarial (minimax) formulation that alternates between reward and policy optimization, which often lead to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Yang Chen , Menglin Zou , Jiaqi Zhang , Yitan Zhang , Junyi Yang , Gael Gendron , Libo Zhang , Jiamou Liu , Michael J. Witbrock

Safety exploration can be regarded as a constrained Markov decision problem where the expected long-term cost is constrained. Previous off-policy algorithms convert the constrained optimization problem into the corresponding unconstrained…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-28 Hengrui Zhang , Youfang Lin , Sheng Han , Shuo Wang , Kai Lv

We study the reinforcement learning (RL) problem in a constrained Markov decision process (CMDP), where an agent explores the environment to maximize the expected cumulative reward while satisfying a single constraint on the expected total…

We consider the problem of learning control policies that optimize a reward function while satisfying constraints due to considerations of safety, fairness, or other costs. We propose a new algorithm, Projection-Based Constrained Policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-08 Tsung-Yen Yang , Justinian Rosca , Karthik Narasimhan , Peter J. Ramadge

Due to limited resources and public safety concerns, deep reinforcement learning (RL) agents for many cyber-physical systems (e.g., autonomous vehicles) are first trained in simulators. However, when deployed in real world environments,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Gengyue Han , Yiheng Feng

Practical reinforcement learning problems are often formulated as constrained Markov decision process (CMDP) problems, in which the agent has to maximize the expected return while satisfying a set of prescribed safety constraints. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-23 Shin-ichi Maeda , Hayato Watahiki , Shintarou Okada , Masanori Koyama

Recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL) enable its use on increasingly complex tasks, but the lack of formal safety guarantees still limits its application in safety-critical settings. A common practical approach is to augment the RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Donggeon David Oh , Duy P. Nguyen , Haimin Hu , Jaime F. Fisac

The goal of robust constrained reinforcement learning (RL) is to optimize an agent's performance under the worst-case model uncertainty while satisfying safety or resource constraints. In this paper, we demonstrate that strong duality does…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Shaocong Ma , Ziyi Chen , Yi Zhou , Heng Huang

This paper presents the concept of an adaptive safe padding that forces Reinforcement Learning (RL) to synthesise optimal control policies while ensuring safety during the learning process. Policies are synthesised to satisfy a goal,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-24 Mohammadhosein Hasanbeig , Alessandro Abate , Daniel Kroening

Counterfactual learning to rank (CLTR) can be risky and, in various circumstances, can produce sub-optimal models that hurt performance when deployed. Safe CLTR was introduced to mitigate these risks when using inverse propensity scoring to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-08 Shashank Gupta , Harrie Oosterhuis , Maarten de Rijke

GRPO-style reinforcement learning (RL)-based LLM fine-tuning algorithms have recently gained popularity. Relying on heuristic trust-region approximations, however, they can lead to brittle optimization behavior, as global importance-ratio…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-09 Doyeon Lee , Eunyi Lyou , Hyunsoo Cho , Sookyung Kim , Joonseok Lee , Jaemoo Choi

Model-free reinforcement learning (RL) methods are succeeding in a growing number of tasks, aided by recent advances in deep learning. However, they tend to suffer from high sample complexity, which hinders their use in real-world domains.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-08 Thanard Kurutach , Ignasi Clavera , Yan Duan , Aviv Tamar , Pieter Abbeel

Ensuring safety is important for the practical deployment of reinforcement learning (RL). Various challenges must be addressed, such as handling stochasticity in the environments, providing rigorous guarantees of persistent state-wise…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-26 Milan Ganai , Zheng Gong , Chenning Yu , Sylvia Herbert , Sicun Gao

The field of risk-constrained reinforcement learning (RCRL) has been developed to effectively reduce the likelihood of worst-case scenarios by explicitly handling risk-measure-based constraints. However, the nonlinearity of risk measures…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-30 Dohyeong Kim , Taehyun Cho , Seungyub Han , Hojun Chung , Kyungjae Lee , Songhwai Oh

Counterfactual learning to rank (CLTR) can be risky and, in various circumstances, can produce sub-optimal models that hurt performance when deployed. Safe CLTR was introduced to mitigate these risks when using inverse propensity scoring to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-17 Shashank Gupta , Harrie Oosterhuis , Maarten de Rijke

Policy optimization methods are one of the most widely used classes of Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms. Yet, so far, such methods have been mostly analyzed from an optimization perspective, without addressing the problem of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-19 Yonathan Efroni , Lior Shani , Aviv Rosenberg , Shie Mannor

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has shown promise in discrete action spaces by eliminating value function dependencies through group-based advantage estimation. However, its application to continuous control remains unexplored,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Rajat Khanda , Mohammad Baqar , Sambuddha Chakrabarti , Satyasaran Changdar

Safety-critical learning requires policies that improve performance without leaving the safe operating regime. We study constrained policy learning where model parameters must satisfy rollout-based safety constraints that can be evaluated…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Shengfan Cao , Francesco Borrelli , Eunhyek Joa

This paper presents a framework to tackle constrained combinatorial optimization problems using deep Reinforcement Learning (RL). To this end, we extend the Neural Combinatorial Optimization (NCO) theory in order to deal with constraints in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-23 Ruben Solozabal , Josu Ceberio , Martin Takáč