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Reinforcement learning (RL) excels in various applications but struggles in dynamic environments where the underlying Markov decision process evolves. Continual reinforcement learning (CRL) enables RL agents to continually learn and adapt…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Xue Yang , Michael Schukat , Junlin Lu , Patrick Mannion , Karl Mason , Enda Howley

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have been successfully applied to control tasks associated with unmanned aerial vehicles and robotics. In recent years, safe RL has been proposed to allow the safe execution of RL algorithms in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Austin Coursey , Marcos Quinones-Grueiro , Gautam Biswas

The central tenet of reinforcement learning (RL) is that agents seek to maximize the sum of cumulative rewards. In contrast, active inference, an emerging framework within cognitive and computational neuroscience, proposes that agents act…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-02 Alexander Tschantz , Beren Millidge , Anil K. Seth , Christopher L. Buckley

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

In the traditional view of reinforcement learning, the agent's goal is to find an optimal policy that maximizes its expected sum of rewards. Once the agent finds this policy, the learning ends. This view contrasts with \emph{continual…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-16 Esraa Elelimy , David Szepesvari , Martha White , Michael Bowling

Risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RL) has become a popular tool for controlling the risk of uncertain outcomes and ensuring reliable performance in highly stochastic sequential decision-making problems. While it has been shown that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Xian Yu , Lei Ying

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

Safe reinforcement learning deals with mitigating or avoiding unsafe situations by reinforcement learning (RL) agents. Safe RL approaches are based on specific risk representations for particular problems or domains. In order to analyze…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-11 Leonardo Villalobos-Arias , Derek Martin , Abhijeet Krishnan , Madeleine Gagné , Colin M. Potts , Arnav Jhala

Learning physical dynamics in a series of non-stationary environments is a challenging but essential task for model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) with visual inputs. It requires the agent to consistently adapt to novel tasks without…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Minting Pan , Wendong Zhang , Geng Chen , Xiangming Zhu , Siyu Gao , Yunbo Wang , Xiaokang Yang

We develop a framework for interacting with uncertain environments in reinforcement learning (RL) by leveraging preferences in the form of utility functions. We claim that there is value in considering different risk measures during…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-23 Hannes Eriksson , Christos Dimitrakakis

Reinforcement learning (RL) agents with pre-specified reward functions cannot provide guaranteed safety across variety of circumstances that an uncertain system might encounter. To guarantee performance while assuring satisfaction of safety…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-04-20 Aquib Mustafa , Majid Mazouchi , Subramanya Nageshrao , Hamidreza Modares

Reinforcement learning (RL) has been successfully applied to a variety of robotics applications, where it outperforms classical methods. However, the safety aspect of RL and the transfer to the real world remain an open challenge. A…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-04-21 Murad Dawood , Ahmed Shokry , Maren Bennewitz

A longstanding goal in safe reinforcement learning (RL) is a method to ensure the safety of a policy throughout the entire process, from learning to operation. However, existing safe RL paradigms inherently struggle to achieve this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Akifumi Wachi , Kohei Miyaguchi , Takumi Tanabe , Rei Sato , Youhei Akimoto

In finance, sequential decision problems are often faced, for which reinforcement learning (RL) emerges as a promising tool for optimisation without the need of analytical tractability. However, the objective of classical RL is the expected…

Computational Finance · Quantitative Finance 2026-02-13 Federico Cacciamani , Roberto Daluiso , Marco Pinciroli , Michele Trapletti , Edoardo Vittori

In risk-averse reinforcement learning (RL), the goal is to optimize some risk measure of the returns. A risk measure often focuses on the worst returns out of the agent's experience. As a result, standard methods for risk-averse RL often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-13 Ido Greenberg , Yinlam Chow , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Shie Mannor

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a general framework for adaptive control, which has proven to be efficient in many domains, e.g., board games, video games or autonomous vehicles. In such problems, an agent faces a sequential decision-making…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-16 Olivier Buffet , Olivier Pietquin , Paul Weng

In continual RL we want agents capable of never-ending learning, and yet our evaluation methodologies do not reflect this. The standard practice in RL is to assume unfettered access to the deployment environment for the full lifetime of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-11 Golnaz Mesbahi , Parham Mohammad Panahi , Olya Mastikhina , Steven Tang , Martha White , Adam White

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful machine learning technique that enables an intelligent agent to learn an optimal policy that maximizes the cumulative rewards in sequential decision making. Most of methods in the existing…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-01-06 Chengchun Shi , Zhengling Qi , Jianing Wang , Fan Zhou

Continuous action spaces in reinforcement learning (RL) are commonly defined as multidimensional intervals. While intervals usually reflect the action boundaries for tasks well, they can be challenging for learning because the typically…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-06 Roland Stolz , Hanna Krasowski , Jakob Thumm , Michael Eichelbeck , Philipp Gassert , Matthias Althoff

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a machine learning approach that trains agents to maximize cumulative rewards through interactions with environments. The integration of RL with deep learning has recently resulted in impressive achievements…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2023-08-31 Hui Bai , Ran Cheng , Yaochu Jin