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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

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

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has made significant strides in enabling artificial agents to learn diverse behaviors. However, learning an effective policy often requires a large number of environment interactions. To mitigate sample…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-04-04 Yash Shukla , Tanushree Burman , Abhishek Kulkarni , Robert Wright , Alvaro Velasquez , Jivko Sinapov

Several works have addressed the problem of incorporating constraints in the reinforcement learning (RL) framework, however majority of them can only guarantee the satisfaction of soft constraints. In this work, we address the problem of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-16 Kwangyeon Kim , Akshita Gupta , Hong-Cheol Choi , Inseok Hwang

In this paper, a novel online, output-feedback, critic-only, model-based reinforcement learning framework is developed for safety-critical control systems operating in complex environments. The developed framework ensures system stability…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-06-28 Tochukwu Elijah Ogri , Muzaffar Qureshi , Zachary I. Bell , Rushikesh Kamalapurkar

This paper proposes a safe reinforcement learning (RL) framework based on forward-invariance-induced action-space design. The control problem is cast as a Markov decision process, but instead of relying on runtime shielding or penalty-based…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-04-10 Chieh Tsai , Muhammad Junayed Hasan Zahed , Salim Hariri , Hossein Rastgoftar

It is quite challenging to ensure the safety of reinforcement learning (RL) agents in an unknown and stochastic environment under hard constraints that require the system state not to reach certain specified unsafe regions. Many popular…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-06-14 Yixuan Wang , Simon Sinong Zhan , Ruochen Jiao , Zhilu Wang , Wanxin Jin , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang , Chao Huang , Qi Zhu

We investigate the important problem of certifying stability of reinforcement learning policies when interconnected with nonlinear dynamical systems. We show that by regulating the input-output gradients of policies, strong guarantees of…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2018-10-30 Ming Jin , Javad Lavaei

In the trial-and-error mechanism of reinforcement learning (RL), a notorious contradiction arises when we expect to learn a safe policy: how to learn a safe policy without enough data and prior model about the dangerous region? Existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-29 Haitong Ma , Changliu Liu , Shengbo Eben Li , Sifa Zheng , Wenchao Sun , Jianyu Chen

We develop provably safe and convergent reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms for control of nonlinear dynamical systems, bridging the gap between the hard safety guarantees of control theory and the convergence guarantees of RL theory.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-08 Wesley A. Suttle , Vipul K. Sharma , Krishna C. Kosaraju , S. Sivaranjani , Ji Liu , Vijay Gupta , Brian M. Sadler

This paper addresses the problem of maintaining safety during training in Reinforcement Learning (RL), such that the safety constraint violations are bounded at any point during learning. In a variety of RL applications the safety of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-19 Rohan Mitta , Hosein Hasanbeig , Jun Wang , Daniel Kroening , Yiannis Kantaros , Alessandro Abate

Recent research has turned to Reinforcement Learning (RL) to solve challenging decision problems, as an alternative to hand-tuned heuristics. RL can learn good policies without the need for modeling the environment's dynamics. Despite this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-30 Pouya Hamadanian , Malte Schwarzkopf , Siddartha Sen , Mohammad Alizadeh

Reinforcement learning (RL) offers a powerful approach for robots to learn complex, collaborative skills by combining Dynamic Movement Primitives (DMPs) for motion and Variable Impedance Control (VIC) for compliant interaction. However,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Shreyas Kumar , Ravi Prakash

Achieving highly dynamic behaviors on humanoid robots, such as running, requires controllers that are both robust and precise, and hence difficult to design. Classical control methods offer valuable insight into how such systems can…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-09-25 Zachary Olkin , Kejun Li , William D. Compton , Aaron D. Ames

Compositionality is a critical aspect of scalable system design. Reinforcement learning (RL) has recently shown substantial success in task learning, but has only recently begun to truly leverage composition. In this paper, we focus on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-30 Kevin Leahy , Makai Mann , Zachary Serlin

The increasing adoption of Reinforcement Learning in safety-critical systems domains such as autonomous vehicles, health, and aviation raises the need for ensuring their safety. Existing safety mechanisms such as adversarial training,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-11 Paulina Stevia Nouwou Mindom , Amin Nikanjam , Foutse Khomh , John Mullins

Some recent papers have extended the concept of finite-time stability (FTS) to the context of 2D linear systems, where it has been referred to as finite-region stability (FRS). FRS methodologies make even more sense than the classical FTS…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-12-20 Chao Liang , Carlo Cosentino , Alessio Merola , Maria Romano , Francesco Amato

Merely pursuing performance may adversely affect the safety, while a conservative policy for safe exploration will degrade the performance. How to balance the safety and performance in learning-based control problems is an interesting yet…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-01-28 Xinyang Wang , Hongwei Zhang , Shimin Wang , Wei Xiao , Martin Guay

Reinforcement learning (RL)-based driver assistance systems seek to improve fuel consumption via continual improvement of powertrain control actions considering experiential data from the field. However, the need to explore diverse…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-01-04 Habtamu Hailemichael , Beshah Ayalew , Lindsey Kerbel , Andrej Ivanco , Keith Loiselle

Ensuring safety for black-box hybrid dynamical systems presents significant challenges due to their instantaneous state jumps and unknown explicit nonlinear dynamics. Existing solutions for strict safety constraint satisfaction, like…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-04-27 Aayushi Shrivastava , Kartik Nagpal , Sairam Jinkala , Jean-Baptiste Bouvier , Negar Mehr