Related papers: ProSh: Probabilistic Shielding for Model-free Rein…
In real-life scenarios, a Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent aiming to maximise their reward, must often also behave in a safe manner, including at training time. Thus, much attention in recent years has been given to Safe RL, where an agent…
This paper targets the efficient construction of a safety shield for decision making in scenarios that incorporate uncertainty. Markov decision processes (MDPs) are prominent models to capture such planning problems. Reinforcement learning…
In offline reinforcement learning (RL), we learn policies from fixed datasets without environment interaction. The major challenges are to provide guarantees on the (1) performance and (2) safety of the resulting policy. A technique called…
Reinforcement learning is a promising approach to synthesizing policies for challenging robotics tasks. A key problem is how to ensure safety of the learned policy---e.g., that a walking robot does not fall over or that an autonomous car…
Safe reinforcement learning (RL) is crucial for real-world applications, and multi-agent interactions introduce additional safety challenges. While Probabilistic Logic Shields (PLS) has been a powerful proposal to enforce safety in…
Safe Reinforcement learning (Safe RL) aims at learning optimal policies while staying safe. A popular solution to Safe RL is shielding, which uses a logical safety specification to prevent an RL agent from taking unsafe actions. However,…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful framework for optimal decision-making and control but often lacks provable guarantees for safety-critical applications. In this paper, we introduce a novel recovery-based shielding framework that…
Shielding is a popular technique for achieving safe reinforcement learning (RL). However, classical shielding approaches come with quite restrictive assumptions making them difficult to deploy in complex environments, particularly those…
Among approaches for provably safe reinforcement learning, Model Predictive Shielding (MPS) has proven effective at complex tasks in continuous, high-dimensional state spaces, by leveraging a backup policy to ensure safety when the learned…
Obtaining safety guarantees for reinforcement learning is a major challenge to achieve applicability for real-world tasks. Safety shields extend standard reinforcement learning and achieve hard safety guarantees. However, existing safety…
This paper proposes a framework for safe reinforcement learning that can handle stochastic nonlinear dynamical systems. We focus on the setting where the nominal dynamics are known, and are subject to additive stochastic disturbances with…
During initial iterations of training in most Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms, agents perform a significant number of random exploratory steps. In the real world, this can limit the practicality of these algorithms as it can lead to…
Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) discovers policies that maximize reward but do not have safety guarantees during the learning and deployment phases. Although shielding with Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) is a promising formal method…
Safety is one of the biggest concerns to applying reinforcement learning (RL) to the physical world. In its core part, it is challenging to ensure RL agents persistently satisfy a hard state constraint without white-box or black-box…
Reinforcement learning has been established over the past decade as an effective tool to find optimal control policies for dynamical systems, with recent focus on approaches that guarantee safety during the learning and/or execution phases.…
Accurate risk quantification and reachability analysis are crucial for safe control and learning, but sampling from rare events, risky states, or long-term trajectories can be prohibitively costly. Motivated by this, we study how to…
Safe exploration is a common problem in reinforcement learning (RL) that aims to prevent agents from making disastrous decisions while exploring their environment. A family of approaches to this problem assume domain knowledge in the form…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown great potential for solving complex tasks in a variety of domains. However, applying RL to safety-critical systems in the real-world is not easy as many algorithms are sample-inefficient and maximising…
Shielding is a prominent model-based technique to ensure safety of autonomous agents. Classical shielding aims to ensure that nothing bad ever happens and comes with strong guarantees about safety and maximal permissiveness. However,…
Safety is still one of the major research challenges in reinforcement learning (RL). In this paper, we address the problem of how to avoid safety violations of RL agents during exploration in probabilistic and partially unknown…