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

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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

Designing reliable decision strategies for autonomous urban driving is challenging. Reinforcement learning (RL) has been used to automatically derive suitable behavior in uncertain environments, but it does not provide any guarantee on the…

Reinforcement learning has been successfully used to solve difficult tasks in complex unknown environments. However, these methods typically do not provide any safety guarantees during the learning process. This is particularly problematic,…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2019-07-02 Torsten Koller , Felix Berkenkamp , Matteo Turchetta , Joschka Boedecker , Andreas Krause

Many sequential decision problems involve finding a policy that maximizes total reward while obeying safety constraints. Although much recent research has focused on the development of safe reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-20 Nolan Wagener , Byron Boots , Ching-An Cheng

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

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

In recent years, Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has emerged as an effective approach to solving real-world tasks. However, despite their successes, DRL-based policies suffer from poor reliability, which limits their deployment in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-24 Davide Corsi , Guy Amir , Andoni Rodriguez , Cesar Sanchez , Guy Katz , Roy Fox

While reinforcement learning produces very promising results for many applications, its main disadvantage is the lack of safety guarantees, which prevents its use in safety-critical systems. In this work, we address this issue by a safety…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-03-15 Niklas Kochdumper , Hanna Krasowski , Xiao Wang , Stanley Bak , Matthias Althoff

For all its successes, Reinforcement Learning (RL) still struggles to deliver formal guarantees on the closed-loop behavior of the learned policy. Among other things, guaranteeing the safety of RL with respect to safety-critical systems is…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-04-03 Sebastien Gros , Mario Zanon , Alberto Bemporad

Recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL) enable its use on increasingly complex tasks, but the lack of formal safety guarantees still limits its application in safety-critical settings. A common practical approach is to augment the RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Donggeon David Oh , Duy P. Nguyen , Haimin Hu , Jaime F. Fisac

Deep reinforcement learning has emerged as a powerful tool for obtaining high-performance policies. However, the safety of these policies has been a long-standing issue. One promising paradigm to guarantee safety is a shield, which shields…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Asger Horn Brorholt , Kim Guldstrand Larsen , Christian Schilling

Shielding is a common method used to guarantee the safety of a system under a black-box controller, such as a neural network controller from deep reinforcement learning (DRL), with simpler, verified controllers. Existing shielding methods…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-10-11 Robert Reed , Morteza Lahijanian

In this paper, we present an online reinforcement learning algorithm for constrained Markov decision processes with a safety constraint. Despite the necessary attention of the scientific community, considering stochastic stopping time, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-26 Abhijit Mazumdar , Rafal Wisniewski , Manuela L. Bujorianu

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has recently impressed the world with stunning results in various applications. While the potential of RL is now well-established, many critical aspects still need to be tackled, including safety and stability…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-09-23 Mario Zanon , Sébastien Gros

One of the key challenges to deep reinforcement learning (deep RL) is to ensure safety at both training and testing phases. In this work, we propose a novel technique of unsupervised action planning to improve the safety of on-policy…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-09-30 Hao-Lun Hsu , Qiuhua Huang , Sehoon Ha

Safe exploration remains a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), limiting the deployment of RL agents in the real world. We propose Sampling-Based Safe Reinforcement Learning (SBSRL), a model-based RL algorithm that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Luca Vignola , Bruce D. Lee , Manish Prajapat , Manuel Wendl , Melanie Zeilinger , Andreas Krause , Yarden As

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

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been shown to be effective in many scenarios. However, it typically requires the exploration of a sufficiently large number of state-action pairs, some of which may be unsafe. Consequently, its application to…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-06-24 Yousef Emam , Gennaro Notomista , Paul Glotfelter , Zsolt Kira , Magnus Egerstedt

As safety violations can lead to severe consequences in real-world robotic applications, the increasing deployment of Reinforcement Learning (RL) in robotic domains has propelled the study of safe exploration for reinforcement learning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-09-21 Hanping Zhang , Yuhong Guo

The applicability of reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms in real-world domains often requires adherence to safety constraints, a need difficult to address given the asymptotic nature of the classic RL optimization objective. In contrast…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-15 Moritz A. Zanger , Karam Daaboul , J. Marius Zöllner