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Related papers: Learning to explore when mistakes are not allowed

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Reinforcement Learning (RL) is essentially a trial-and-error learning procedure which may cause unsafe behavior during the exploration-and-exploitation process. This hinders the application of RL to real-world control problems, especially…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-03 Yutong Li , Nan Li , H. Eric Tseng , Anouck Girard , Dimitar Filev , Ilya Kolmanovsky

Ensuring safety during reinforcement learning (RL) training is critical in real-world applications where unsafe exploration can lead to devastating outcomes. While most safe RL methods mitigate risk through constraints or penalization, they…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-29 Yeeun Lim , Narim Jeong , Donghwan Lee

Offline Goal-Conditioned RL (GCRL) offers a feasible paradigm for learning general-purpose policies from diverse and multi-task offline datasets. Despite notable recent progress, the predominant offline GCRL methods, mainly model-free, face…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-17 Mianchu Wang , Rui Yang , Xi Chen , Hao Sun , Meng Fang , Giovanni Montana

Training a model-free reinforcement learning agent requires allowing the agent to sufficiently explore the environment to search for an optimal policy. In safety-constrained environments, utilizing unsupervised exploration or a non-optimal…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-08-05 Erfan Entezami , Mahsa Sahebdel , Dhawal Gupta

Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) learns to make decisions on multiple levels of temporal abstraction. A key challenge in HRL is that the low-level policy changes over time, making it difficult for the high-level policy to generate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Vivienne Huiling Wang , Tinghuai Wang , Joni Pajarinen

Offline goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (GCRL) promises general-purpose skill learning in the form of reaching diverse goals from purely offline datasets. We propose $\textbf{Go}$al-conditioned $f$-$\textbf{A}$dvantage…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-11 Yecheng Jason Ma , Jason Yan , Dinesh Jayaraman , Osbert Bastani

Single-task RL agents are typically trained under a fixed reward function, which limits their robustness to reward misspecification and their ability to adapt to changing preferences. We introduce Reward-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Michal Nauman , Marek Cygan , Pieter Abbeel

Reinforcement learning (RL) is ubiquitous in the development of modern AI systems. However, state-of-the-art RL agents require extensive, and potentially unsafe, interactions with their environments to learn effectively. These limitations…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-01 Yarden As , Bhavya Sukhija , Lenart Treven , Carmelo Sferrazza , Stelian Coros , Andreas Krause

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

Real-world decision-making tasks typically occur in complex and open environments, posing significant challenges to reinforcement learning (RL) agents' exploration efficiency and long-horizon planning capabilities. A promising approach is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Yajie Qi , Wei Wei , Lin Li , Lijun Zhang , Zhidong Gao , Da Wang , Huizhong Song

Designing rewards for Reinforcement Learning (RL) is challenging because it needs to convey the desired task, be efficient to optimize, and be easy to compute. The latter is particularly problematic when applying RL to robotics, where…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-28 Yiming Ding , Carlos Florensa , Mariano Phielipp , Pieter Abbeel

In this paper, we present an autonomous navigation system for goal-driven exploration of unknown environments through deep reinforcement learning (DRL). Points of interest (POI) for possible navigation directions are obtained from the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-09-10 Reinis Cimurs , Il Hong Suh , Jin Han Lee

Unsupervised pretraining has driven empirical advances in goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (GCRL), but its theoretical foundations remain poorly understood. In particular, an influential class of methods, mutual information skill…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Alireza Modirshanechi , Benjamin Eysenbach , Peter Dayan , Eric Schulz

We consider the problem of reinforcement learning under safety requirements, in which an agent is trained to complete a given task, typically formalized as the maximization of a reward signal over time, while concurrently avoiding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-25 Tu-Hoa Pham , Giovanni De Magistris , Don Joven Agravante , Subhajit Chaudhury , Asim Munawar , Ryuki Tachibana

In reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms, exploratory control inputs are used during learning to acquire knowledge for decision making and control, while the true dynamics of a controlled object is unknown. However, this exploring property…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-08 Yoshihiro Okawa , Tomotake Sasaki , Hidenao Iwane

Offline goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (GCRL) often struggles with long-horizon tasks, where errors in value estimation accumulate and produce unreliable policies. It is typically assumed that effective long-term planning is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Evgenii Opryshko , Junwei Quan , Claas Voelcker , Yilun Du , Igor Gilitschenski

Goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (RL) concerns the problem of training an agent to maximize the probability of reaching target goal states. This paper presents an analysis of the goal-conditioned setting based on optimal control. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Nathan P. Lawrence , Ali Mesbah

In many RL applications, ensuring an agent's actions adhere to constraints is crucial for safety. Most previous methods in Action-Constrained Reinforcement Learning (ACRL) employ a projection layer after the policy network to correct the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Janaka Chathuranga Brahmanage , Jiajing Ling , Akshat Kumar

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

Standard approaches to goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (GCRL) that rely on temporal-difference learning can be unstable and sample-inefficient due to bootstrapping. While recent work has explored contrastive and supervised…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Franki Nguimatsia Tiofack , Fabian Schramm , Théotime Le Hellard , Justin Carpentier