English
Related papers

Related papers: Optimistic Exploration for Risk-Averse Constrained…

200 papers

In domains such as finance, healthcare, and robotics, managing worst-case scenarios is critical, as failure to do so can lead to catastrophic outcomes. Distributional Reinforcement Learning (DRL) provides a natural framework to incorporate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Mehrdad Moghimi , Hyejin Ku

Most Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods are traditionally studied in an active learning setting, where agents directly interact with their environments, observe action outcomes, and learn through trial and error. However, allowing…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-10-16 Maryam Zare , Parham M. Kebria , Abbas Khosravi

The popularity of Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR), a risk functional from finance, has been growing in the control systems community due to its intuitive interpretation and axiomatic foundation. We consider a nonstandard optimal control…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-06-22 Margaret P. Chapman , Michael Fauss , Kevin M. Smith

Model-based reinforcement learning algorithms with probabilistic dynamical models are amongst the most data-efficient learning methods. This is often attributed to their ability to distinguish between epistemic and aleatoric uncertainty.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-02 Sebastian Curi , Felix Berkenkamp , Andreas Krause

Safe reinforcement learning (SafeRL) extends standard reinforcement learning with the idea of safety, where safety is typically defined through the constraint of the expected cost return of a trajectory being below a set limit. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-04 David Eckel , Baohe Zhang , Joschka Bödecker

Recently, there has been a surge in interest in safe and robust techniques within reinforcement learning (RL). Current notions of risk in RL fail to capture the potential for systemic failures such as abrupt stoppages from system failures…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2019-10-09 David Mguni

Reinforcement learning (RL) in large or infinite state spaces is notoriously challenging, both theoretically (where worst-case sample and computational complexities must scale with state space cardinality) and experimentally (where function…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-28 Marcel Hussing , Michael Kearns , Aaron Roth , Sikata Bela Sengupta , Jessica Sorrell

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to optimize a policy using collected data without online interactions. Model-based approaches are particularly appealing for addressing offline RL challenges because of their capability to mitigate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Hao Li , Xiao-Hu Zhou , Shu-Hai Li , Mei-Jiang Gui , Xiao-Liang Xie , Shi-Qi Liu , Shuang-Yi Wang , Zhen-Qiu Feng , Zeng-Guang Hou

Considering non-stationary environments in online optimization enables decision-maker to effectively adapt to changes and improve its performance over time. In such cases, it is favorable to adopt a strategy that minimizes the negative…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-04-05 Siyi Wang , Zifan Wang , Xinlei Yi , Michael M. Zavlanos , Karl H. Johansson , Sandra Hirche

Offline reinforcement learning (RL), also known as batch RL, offers the prospect of policy optimization from large pre-recorded datasets without online environment interaction. It addresses challenges with regard to the cost of data…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a powerful method for controlling dynamic systems, but its learning mechanism can lead to unpredictable actions that undermine the safety of critical systems. Here, we propose RL with Adaptive Regularization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-01 Haozhe Tian , Homayoun Hamedmoghadam , Robert Shorten , Pietro Ferraro

In real-world scenarios, risk-averse learning is valuable for mitigating potential adverse outcomes. However, the delayed feedback makes it challenging to assess and manage risk effectively. In this paper, we investigate risk-averse…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-06 Siyi Wang , Zifan Wang , Karl Henrik Johansson , Sandra Hirche

Safety in reinforcement learning (RL) is a key property in both training and execution in many domains such as autonomous driving or finance. In this paper, we formalize it with a constrained RL formulation in the distributional RL setting.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-01 Jianyi Zhang , Paul Weng

This research is concerned with the novel application and investigation of `Soft Actor Critic' (SAC) based Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) to control the cooling setpoint (and hence cooling loads) of a large commercial building to harness…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-08 Anjukan Kathirgamanathan , Eleni Mangina , Donal P. Finn

Most prior approaches to offline reinforcement learning (RL) utilize \textit{behavior regularization}, typically augmenting existing off-policy actor critic algorithms with a penalty measuring divergence between the policy and the offline…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-15 Haoran Xu , Xianyuan Zhan , Jianxiong Li , Honglei Yin

Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved remarkable performance in numerous sequential decision making and control tasks. However, a common problem is that learned nearly optimal policy always overfits to the training environment and may…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-01 Yangang Ren , Jingliang Duan , Shengbo Eben Li , Yang Guan , Qi Sun

Balancing reward and safety in constrained reinforcement learning remains challenging due to poor generalization from sharp value minima and inadequate handling of heavy-tailed risk distribution. We introduce Safe Langevin Soft Actor-Critic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Mahesh Keswani , Samyak Jain , Raunak P. Bhattacharyya

In this paper we propose a framework towards achieving two intertwined objectives: (i) equipping reinforcement learning with active exploration and deliberate information gathering, such that it regulates state and parameter uncertainties…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-10 Mohammad S. Ramadan , Mahmoud A. Hayajnh , Michael T. Tolley , Kyriakos G. Vamvoudakis

Standard reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms assume that the observation of the next state comes instantaneously and at no cost. In a wide variety of sequential decision making tasks ranging from medical treatment to scientific…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-05-27 Colin Bellinger , Rory Coles , Mark Crowley , Isaac Tamblyn

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) algorithms for continuous action spaces are known to be brittle toward hyperparameters as well as \cut{being}sample inefficient. Soft Actor Critic (SAC) proposes an off-policy deep actor critic algorithm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-10 Patrick Nadeem Ward , Ariella Smofsky , Avishek Joey Bose