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Safety remains a central obstacle preventing widespread use of RL in the real world: learning new tasks in uncertain environments requires extensive exploration, but safety requires limiting exploration. We propose Recovery RL, an algorithm…

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 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

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

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

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

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

Reinforcement learning (RL)-based adaptive cruise control systems (ACC) that learn and adapt to road, traffic and vehicle conditions are attractive for enhancing vehicle energy efficiency and traffic flow. However, the application of RL in…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-01-04 Habtamu Hailemichael , Beshah Ayalew , Lindsey Kerbel , Andrej Ivanco , Keith Loiselle

Despite the many recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL), the question of learning policies that robustly satisfy state constraints under unknown disturbances remains open. In this paper, we offer a new perspective on achieving…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Pierre-François Massiani , Alexander von Rohr , Lukas Haverbeck , Sebastian Trimpe

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

Although Reinforcement Learning (RL) is effective for sequential decision-making problems under uncertainty, it still fails to thrive in real-world systems where risk or safety is a binding constraint. In this paper, we formulate the RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-07 Yannis Flet-Berliac , Debabrota Basu

Reinforcement learning (RL) is an effective approach to motion planning in autonomous driving, where an optimal driving policy can be automatically learned using the interaction data with the environment. Nevertheless, the reward function…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-08-28 Lin-Chi Wu , Zengjie Zhang , Sofie Haesaert , Zhiqiang Ma , Zhiyong Sun

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

An emerging field of sequential decision problems is safe Reinforcement Learning (RL), where the objective is to maximize the reward while obeying safety constraints. Being able to handle constraints is essential for deploying RL agents in…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-03-08 Nick Bührer , Zhejun Zhang , Alexander Liniger , Fisher Yu , Luc Van Gool

Automated vehicle control using reinforcement learning (RL) has attracted significant attention due to its potential to learn driving policies through environment interaction. However, RL agents often face training challenges in sample…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-09-08 Zhihao Zhang , Chengyang Peng , Ekim Yurtsever , Keith A. Redmill

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) trains a policy to maximize the task reward while satisfying safety constraints. While prior works focus on the performance optimality, we find that the optimal solutions of many safe RL problems are not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-03 Zuxin Liu , Zijian Guo , Zhepeng Cen , Huan Zhang , Jie Tan , Bo Li , Ding Zhao

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been widely applied to many control tasks and substantially improved the performances compared to conventional control methods in many domains where the reward function is well defined. However, for many…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-22 Baohe Zhang , Yuan Zhang , Lilli Frison , Thomas Brox , Joschka Bödecker

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

Safe reinforcement learning (Safe RL) aims to ensure policy performance while satisfying safety constraints. However, most existing Safe RL methods assume benign environments, making them vulnerable to adversarial perturbations commonly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-19 Jialiang Fan , Shixiong Jiang , Mengyu Liu , Fanxin Kong

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