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Related papers: Learning to explore when mistakes are not allowed

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Risk-averse Constrained Reinforcement Learning (RaCRL) aims to learn policies that minimise the likelihood of rare and catastrophic constraint violations caused by an environment's inherent randomness. In general, risk-aversion leads to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-28 James McCarthy , Radu Marinescu , Elizabeth Daly , Ivana Dusparic

One of the gnarliest challenges in reinforcement learning (RL) is exploration that scales to vast domains, where novelty-, or coverage-seeking behaviour falls short. Goal-directed, purposeful behaviours are able to overcome this, but rely…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-10 Akhil Bagaria , Ray Jiang , Ramana Kumar , Tom Schaul

Efficient exploration is necessary to achieve good sample efficiency for reinforcement learning in general. From small, tabular settings such as gridworlds to large, continuous and sparse reward settings such as robotic object manipulation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-20 Zhaohan Daniel Guo , Emma Brunskill

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

Reinforcement learning (RL) in real-world safety-critical target settings like urban driving is hazardous, imperiling the RL agent, other agents, and the environment. To overcome this difficulty, we propose a "safety-critical adaptation"…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-19 Jesse Zhang , Brian Cheung , Chelsea Finn , Sergey Levine , Dinesh Jayaraman

Designing reliable decision strategies for autonomous urban driving is challenging. Reinforcement learning (RL) has been used to automatically derive suitable behavior in uncertain environments, but it does not provide any guarantee on the…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents have great successes in solving tasks with large observation and action spaces from limited feedback. Still, training the agents is data-intensive and there are no guarantees that the learned behavior is…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-10-20 Helge Spieker

Safe exploration aims at addressing the limitations of Reinforcement Learning (RL) in safety-critical scenarios, where failures during trial-and-error learning may incur high costs. Several methods exist to incorporate external knowledge or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-13 Xiaotong Ji , Antonio Filieri

Learning agile humanoid behaviors from human motion offers a powerful route to natural, coordinated control, but existing approaches face a persistent trade-off: reference-tracking policies are often brittle outside the demonstration…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-02-25 Jiashun Wang , M. Eva Mungai , He Li , Jean Pierre Sleiman , Jessica Hodgins , Farbod Farshidian

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

Safety is a critical concern when deploying reinforcement learning agents for realistic tasks. Recently, safe reinforcement learning algorithms have been developed to optimize the agent's performance while avoiding violations of safety…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-05 Baiming Chen , Zuxin Liu , Jiacheng Zhu , Mengdi Xu , Wenhao Ding , Ding Zhao

Learning from rewards (i.e., reinforcement learning or RL) and learning to imitate a teacher (i.e., teacher-student learning) are two established approaches for solving sequential decision-making problems. To combine the benefits of these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-21 Idan Shenfeld , Zhang-Wei Hong , Aviv Tamar , Pulkit Agrawal

Ensuring safety in autonomous driving (AD) remains a significant challenge, especially in highly dynamic and complex traffic environments where diverse agents interact and unexpected hazards frequently emerge. Traditional reinforcement…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Dong Hu , Fenqing Hu , Lidong Yang , Chao Huang

During initial iterations of training in most Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms, agents perform a significant number of random exploratory steps. In the real world, this can limit the practicality of these algorithms as it can lead to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-17 Ashish Kumar Jayant , Shalabh Bhatnagar

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

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

Scenario-based testing is considered state-of-the-art for verifying and validating Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADASs) and Automated Driving Systems (ADSs). However, the practical application of scenario-based testing requires an…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-06-07 Joshua Ransiek , Johannes Plaum , Jacob Langner , Eric Sax

Model-free continuous control for robot navigation tasks using Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) that relies on noisy policies for exploration is sensitive to the density of rewards. In practice, robots are usually deployed in cluttered…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-02-24 Mingyu Cai , Erfan Aasi , Calin Belta , Cristian-Ioan Vasile

Model information can be used to predict future trajectories, so it has huge potential to avoid dangerous region when implementing reinforcement learning (RL) on real-world tasks, like autonomous driving. However, existing studies mostly…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-03-08 Haitong Ma , Jianyu Chen , Shengbo Eben Li , Ziyu Lin , Yang Guan , Yangang Ren , Sifa Zheng

We propose Convex Constraint Learning for Reinforcement Learning (CoCoRL), a novel approach for inferring shared constraints in a Constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP) from a set of safe demonstrations with possibly different reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-05 David Lindner , Xin Chen , Sebastian Tschiatschek , Katja Hofmann , Andreas Krause