English
Related papers

Related papers: A universal policy wrapper with guarantees

200 papers

Adapting an agent's behaviour to new environments has been one of the primary focus areas of physics based reinforcement learning. Although recent approaches such as universal policy networks partially address this issue by enabling the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-15 Buddhika Laknath Semage , Thommen George Karimpanal , Santu Rana , Svetha Venkatesh

This paper develops the first policy gradient method with global optimality guarantee and complexity analysis for robust reinforcement learning under model mismatch. Robust reinforcement learning is to learn a policy robust to model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-17 Yue Wang , Shaofeng Zou

Reinforcement learning (RL) agents need to be robust to variations in safety-critical environments. While system identification methods provide a way to infer the variation from online experience, they can fail in settings where fast…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-07 Annie Xie , Shagun Sodhani , Chelsea Finn , Joelle Pineau , Amy Zhang

Off-policy reinforcement learning algorithms promise to be applicable in settings where only a fixed data-set (batch) of environment interactions is available and no new experience can be acquired. This property makes these algorithms…

Reinforcement learning (RL) and model predictive control (MPC) offer a wealth of distinct approaches for automatic decision-making under uncertainty. Given the impact both fields have had independently across numerous domains, there is…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-10-13 Nathan P. Lawrence , Philip D. Loewen , Michael G. Forbes , R. Bhushan Gopaluni , Ali Mesbah

Policy evaluation estimates the performance of a policy by (1) collecting data from the environment and (2) processing raw data into a meaningful estimate. Due to the sequential nature of reinforcement learning, any improper data-collecting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-21 Shuze Daniel Liu , Claire Chen , Shangtong Zhang

To provide safety guarantees for learning-based control systems, recent work has developed formal verification methods to apply after training ends. However, if the trained policy does not meet the specifications, or there is conservatism…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-04-24 Puja Chaudhury , Alexander Estornell , Michael Everett

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

In this work we propose an approach to learn a robust policy for solving the pivoting task. Recently, several model-free continuous control algorithms were shown to learn successful policies without prior knowledge of the dynamics of the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2017-03-03 Rika Antonova , Silvia Cruciani , Christian Smith , Danica Kragic

Reinforcement learning (RL) for reachability specifications is fundamental in sequential decision-making, yet theoretical guarantees remain less explored. A recent work achieves asymptotic convergence to optimal policies. However, this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Amogh Palasamudram , Jakub Svoboda , Suguman Bansal , Krishnendu Chatterjee

The performance of reinforcement learning depends upon designing an appropriate action space, where the effect of each action is measurable, yet, granular enough to permit flexible behavior. So far, this process involved non-trivial user…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-08 Edoardo Cetin , Oya Celiktutan

Safety is a primary concern when applying reinforcement learning to real-world control tasks, especially in the presence of external disturbances. However, existing safe reinforcement learning algorithms rarely account for external…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-12 Zeyang Li , Chuxiong Hu , Shengbo Eben Li , Jia Cheng , Yunan Wang

When developing reinforcement learning agents, the standard approach is to train an agent to converge to a fixed policy that is as close to optimal as possible for a single fixed reward function. If different agent behaviour is required in…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2021-01-29 David O'Callaghan , Patrick Mannion

A precondition for the deployment of a Reinforcement Learning agent to a real-world system is to provide guarantees on the learning process. While a learning algorithm will eventually converge to a good policy, there are no guarantees on…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-12-27 Paul Daoudi , Mathias Formoso , Othman Gaizi , Achraf Azize , Evrard Garcelon

Policy gradient methods, where one searches for the policy of interest by maximizing the value functions using first-order information, become increasingly popular for sequential decision making in reinforcement learning, games, and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-10-10 Shicong Cen , Yuejie Chi

For an autonomous agent to fulfill a wide range of user-specified goals at test time, it must be able to learn broadly applicable and general-purpose skill repertoires. Furthermore, to provide the requisite level of generality, these skills…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-12-05 Ashvin Nair , Vitchyr Pong , Murtaza Dalal , Shikhar Bahl , Steven Lin , Sergey Levine

We propose a reinforcement learning (RL) framework for multi-objective decision-making, where the agent seeks to optimize a vector of rewards rather than a single scalar value. The objective is to ensure that the time-averaged reward vector…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-11-18 Rahul Misra , Manuela L. Bujorianu , Rafał Wisniewski

Although in recent years reinforcement learning has become very popular the number of successful applications to different kinds of operations research problems is rather scarce. Reinforcement learning is based on the well-studied dynamic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-03 Manuel Schneckenreither

Lifelong reinforcement learning provides a promising framework for developing versatile agents that can accumulate knowledge over a lifetime of experience and rapidly learn new tasks by building upon prior knowledge. However, current…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-05-22 Haitham Bou Ammar , Rasul Tutunov , Eric Eaton

Ensuring safety is a crucial challenge when deploying reinforcement learning (RL) to real-world systems. We develop confidence-based safety filters, a control-theoretic approach for certifying state safety constraints for nominal policies…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-05 Sebastian Curi , Armin Lederer , Sandra Hirche , Andreas Krause