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An important problem in reinforcement learning is designing agents that learn to solve tasks safely in an environment. A common solution is for a human expert to define either a penalty in the reward function or a cost to be minimised when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-02 Geraud Nangue Tasse , Tamlin Love , Mark Nemecek , Steven James , Benjamin Rosman

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

Autonomous robots require high degrees of cognitive and motoric intelligence to come into our everyday life. In non-structured environments and in the presence of uncertainties, such degrees of intelligence are not easy to obtain.…

The safety constraints commonly used by existing safe reinforcement learning (RL) methods are defined only on expectation of initial states, but allow each certain state to be unsafe, which is unsatisfying for real-world safety-critical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-15 Haitong Ma , Yang Guan , Shegnbo Eben Li , Xiangteng Zhang , Sifa Zheng , Jianyu Chen

An important facet of reinforcement learning (RL) has to do with how the agent goes about exploring the environment. Traditional exploration strategies typically focus on efficiency and ignore safety. However, for practical applications,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-04-23 Jiameng Fan , Wenchao Li

In safe offline reinforcement learning (RL), the objective is to develop a policy that maximizes cumulative rewards while strictly adhering to safety constraints, utilizing only offline data. Traditional methods often face difficulties in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Prajwal Koirala , Zhanhong Jiang , Soumik Sarkar , Cody Fleming

Representation learning is a central challenge across a range of machine learning areas. In reinforcement learning, effective and functional representations have the potential to tremendously accelerate learning progress and solve more…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-30 Dibya Ghosh , Abhishek Gupta , Sergey Levine

Algorithmic recommendations and decisions have become ubiquitous in today's society. Many of these data-driven policies, especially in the realm of public policy, are based on known, deterministic rules to ensure their transparency and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-04-02 Eli Ben-Michael , D. James Greiner , Kosuke Imai , Zhichao Jiang

Reinforcement Learning (RL) for control has become increasingly popular due to its ability to learn rich feedback policies that take into account uncertainty and complex representations of the environment. When considering safety…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-21 Sean Vaskov , Wilko Schwarting , Chris L. Baker

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

Reinforcement learning has been established over the past decade as an effective tool to find optimal control policies for dynamical systems, with recent focus on approaches that guarantee safety during the learning and/or execution phases.…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-10-06 S M Nahid Mahmud , Scott A Nivison , Zachary I. Bell , Rushikesh Kamalapurkar

Reinforcement learning algorithms are generally designed to maximize the expected return across a population. However, a policy that is optimal on average may be suboptimal for certain individuals, leading to potential safety concerns. To…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-26 Jingyi Li , Peng Wu , Chengchun Shi

Growing concerns regarding the operational usage of AI models in the real-world has caused a surge of interest in explaining AI models' decisions to humans. Reinforcement Learning is not an exception in this regard. In this work, we propose…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-06 Omid Davoodi , Majid Komeili

We address the problem of deploying a reinforcement learning (RL) agent on a physical system such as a datacenter cooling unit or robot, where critical constraints must never be violated. We show how to exploit the typically smooth dynamics…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-01-29 Gal Dalal , Krishnamurthy Dvijotham , Matej Vecerik , Todd Hester , Cosmin Paduraru , Yuval Tassa

Robust policies enable reinforcement learning agents to effectively adapt to and operate in unpredictable, dynamic, and ever-changing real-world environments. Factored representations, which break down complex state and action spaces into…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-20 Panayiotis Panayiotou , Özgür Şimşek

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) excels in various control tasks, yet the absence of safety guarantees hampers its real-world applicability. In particular, explorations during learning usually results in safety violations, while the RL…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Yifan Sun , Feihan Li , Weiye Zhao , Rui Chen , Tianhao Wei , Changliu Liu

We present a new model-based algorithm for reinforcement learning (RL) which consists of explicit exploration and exploitation phases, and is applicable in large or infinite state spaces. The algorithm maintains a set of dynamics models…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-03 Mikael Henaff

Learned representations in deep reinforcement learning (DRL) have to extract task-relevant information from complex observations, balancing between robustness to distraction and informativeness to the policy. Such stable and rich…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-28 Mete Kemertas , Tristan Aumentado-Armstrong

In this paper, we present an online reinforcement learning algorithm for constrained Markov decision processes with a safety constraint. Despite the necessary attention of the scientific community, considering stochastic stopping time, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-26 Abhijit Mazumdar , Rafal Wisniewski , Manuela L. Bujorianu

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