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Related papers: ProSh: Probabilistic Shielding for Model-free Rein…

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Reinforcement learning is a promising approach to learning control policies for performing complex multi-agent robotics tasks. However, a policy learned in simulation often fails to guarantee even simple safety properties such as obstacle…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-01-01 Wenbo Zhang , Osbert Bastani , Vijay Kumar

Designing Reinforcement Learning (RL) solutions for real-life problems remains a significant challenge. A major area of concern is safety. "Shielding" is a popular technique to enforce safety in RL by turning user-defined safety…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-31 Alexander Politowicz , Sahisnu Mazumder , Bing Liu

We study the problem of learning safe control policies that are also effective; i.e., maximizing the probability of satisfying a linear temporal logic (LTL) specification of a task, and the discounted reward capturing the (classic) control…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Alper Kamil Bozkurt , Yu Wang , Miroslav Pajic

This paper proposes tackling safety-critical stochastic Reinforcement Learning (RL) tasks with a sample-based, model-based approach. At the core of the method lies a Model Predictive Control (MPC) scheme that acts as function approximation,…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-07-30 Filippo Airaldi , Bart De Schutter , Azita Dabiri

Reinforcement learning algorithms discover policies that maximize reward, but do not necessarily guarantee safety during learning or execution phases. We introduce a new approach to learn optimal policies while enforcing properties…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2017-09-05 Mohammed Alshiekh , Roderick Bloem , Ruediger Ehlers , Bettina Könighofer , Scott Niekum , Ufuk Topcu

While Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has achieved remarkable success across various domains, it remains vulnerable to occasional catastrophic failures without additional safeguards. An effective solution to prevent these failures is to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-03 Kyungmin Kim , Davide Corsi , Andoni Rodriguez , JB Lanier , Benjami Parellada , Pierre Baldi , Cesar Sanchez , Roy Fox

Real-world reinforcement learning (RL) problems often demand that agents behave safely by obeying a set of designed constraints. We address the challenge of safe RL by coupling a safety guide based on model predictive control (MPC) with a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-30 Samuel Pfrommer , Tanmay Gautam , Alec Zhou , Somayeh Sojoudi

It is challenging to use reinforcement learning (RL) in cyber-physical systems due to the lack of safety guarantees during learning. Although there have been various proposals to reduce undesired behaviors during learning, most of these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-28 Masaki Waga , Ezequiel Castellano , Sasinee Pruekprasert , Stefan Klikovits , Toru Takisaka , Ichiro Hasuo

A major challenge to deploying cyber-physical systems with learning-enabled controllers is to ensure their safety, especially in the face of changing environments that necessitate runtime knowledge acquisition. Model-checking and automated…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2025-02-27 Yao Feng , Jun Zhu , André Platzer , Jonathan Laurent

Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) is widely used to specify high-level objectives for system policies, and it is highly desirable for autonomous systems to learn the optimal policy with respect to such specifications. However, learning the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-26 Daqian Shao , Marta Kwiatkowska

Safe reinforcement learning (Safe RL) refers to a class of techniques that aim to prevent RL algorithms from violating constraints in the process of decision-making and exploration during trial and error. In this paper, a novel model-free…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-08-14 Homayoun Honari , Mehran Ghafarian Tamizi , Homayoun Najjaran

Agents controlled by the output of reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms often transition to unsafe states, particularly in uncertain and partially observable environments. Partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) provide a…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-09-16 Steven Carr , Georgios Bakirtzis , Ufuk Topcu

Besides the recent impressive results on reinforcement learning (RL), safety is still one of the major research challenges in RL. RL is a machine-learning approach to determine near-optimal policies in Markov decision processes (MDPs). In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-06 Bettina Könighofer , Julian Rudolf , Alexander Palmisano , Martin Tappler , Roderick Bloem

Safe exploration is a challenging and important problem in model-free reinforcement learning (RL). Often the safety cost is sparse and unknown, which unavoidably leads to constraint violations -- a phenomenon ideally to be avoided in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-13 Aivar Sootla , Alexander I. Cowen-Rivers , Jun Wang , Haitham Bou Ammar

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn policies that satisfy certain constraints before deploying them to safety-critical applications. Previous primal-dual style approaches suffer from instability issues and lack optimality…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-20 Zuxin Liu , Zhepeng Cen , Vladislav Isenbaev , Wei Liu , Zhiwei Steven Wu , Bo Li , Ding Zhao

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms aim to learn optimal decisions in unknown environments through experience of taking actions and observing the rewards gained. In some cases, the environment is not influenced by the actions of the RL…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as an efficient method of choice for solving complex sequential decision making problems in automatic control, computer science, economics, and biology. In this paper we present a model-free RL…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2019-09-13 Mohammadhosein Hasanbeig , Yiannis Kantaros , Alessandro Abate , Daniel Kroening , George J. Pappas , Insup Lee

This paper delves into the problem of safe reinforcement learning (RL) in a partially observable environment with the aim of achieving safe-reachability objectives. In traditional partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDP),…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-04 Xiaoyuan Cheng , Boli Chen , Liz Varga , Yukun Hu

We propose a method to encourage safety in Model Predictive Control (MPC)-based Reinforcement Learning (RL) via Gaussian Process (GP) regression. This framework consists of 1) a parametric MPC scheme that is employed as model-based…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-12-13 Filippo Airaldi , Bart De Schutter , Azita Dabiri

In this paper, we consider the problem of learning safe policies for probabilistic-constrained reinforcement learning (RL). Specifically, a safe policy or controller is one that, with high probability, maintains the trajectory of the agent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-14 Weiqin Chen , Dharmashankar Subramanian , Santiago Paternain