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Reinforcement learning (RL) for robotics is challenging due to the difficulty in hand-engineering a dense cost function, which can lead to unintended behavior, and dynamical uncertainty, which makes exploration and constraint satisfaction…

Model-based reinforcement learning (RL) is considered to be a promising approach to reduce the sample complexity that hinders model-free RL. However, the theoretical understanding of such methods has been rather limited. This paper…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-16 Yuping Luo , Huazhe Xu , Yuanzhi Li , Yuandong Tian , Trevor Darrell , Tengyu Ma

This paper investigates model robustness in reinforcement learning (RL) to reduce the sim-to-real gap in practice. We adopt the framework of distributionally robust Markov decision processes (RMDPs), aimed at learning a policy that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-09 Laixi Shi , Gen Li , Yuting Wei , Yuxin Chen , Matthieu Geist , Yuejie Chi

We develop an approach for solving time-consistent risk-sensitive stochastic optimization problems using model-free reinforcement learning (RL). Specifically, we assume agents assess the risk of a sequence of random variables using dynamic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-01 Anthony Coache , Sebastian Jaimungal

The growing trend of fledgling reinforcement learning systems making their way into real-world applications has been accompanied by growing concerns for their safety and robustness. In recent years, a variety of approaches have been put…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-03 Chloe He , Borja G. Leon , Francesco Belardinelli

It is quite challenging to ensure the safety of reinforcement learning (RL) agents in an unknown and stochastic environment under hard constraints that require the system state not to reach certain specified unsafe regions. Many popular…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-06-14 Yixuan Wang , Simon Sinong Zhan , Ruochen Jiao , Zhilu Wang , Wanxin Jin , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang , Chao Huang , Qi Zhu

In the last decade, reinforcement learning successfully solved complex control tasks and decision-making problems, like the Go board game. Yet, there are few success stories when it comes to deploying those algorithms to real-world…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-09-13 Giuseppe Paolo , Jonas Gonzalez-Billandon , Albert Thomas , Balázs Kégl

Training sophisticated agents for optimal decision-making under uncertainty has been key to the rapid development of modern autonomous systems across fields. Notably, model-free reinforcement learning (RL) has enabled decision-making agents…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-21 Thomas Banker , Ali Mesbah

Many challenging real-world problems require the deployment of ensembles multiple complementary learning models to reach acceptable performance levels. While effective, applying the entire ensemble to every sample is costly and often…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2022-09-20 Orel Lavie , Asaf Shabtai , Gilad Katz

Model-based Reinforcement Learning (MBRL) has shown many desirable properties for intelligent control tasks. However, satisfying safety and stability constraints during training and rollout remains an open question. We propose a new…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-05-28 Harry Zhang

Reinforcement learning (RL) solves sequential decision-making problems via a trial-and-error process interacting with the environment. While RL achieves outstanding success in playing complex video games that allow huge trial-and-error,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-22 Fan-Ming Luo , Tian Xu , Hang Lai , Xiong-Hui Chen , Weinan Zhang , Yang Yu

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a control approach that can handle nonlinear stochastic optimal control problems. However, despite the promise exhibited, RL has yet to see marked translation to industrial practice primarily due to its…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-15 Elton Pan , Panagiotis Petsagkourakis , Max Mowbray , Dongda Zhang , Antonio del Rio-Chanona

Reinforcement learning algorithms typically necessitate extensive exploration of the state space to find optimal policies. However, in safety-critical applications, the risks associated with such exploration can lead to catastrophic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-28 Kaustubh Mani , Vincent Mai , Charlie Gauthier , Annie Chen , Samer Nashed , Liam Paull

Quantized neural networks (NN) are the common standard to efficiently deploy deep learning models on tiny hardware platforms. However, we notice that quantized NNs are as vulnerable to adversarial attacks as the full-precision models. With…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-17 Lorena Qendro , Sangwon Ha , René de Jong , Partha Maji

Prompt injection poses serious security risks to real-world LLM applications, particularly autonomous agents. Although many defenses have been proposed, their robustness against adaptive attacks remains insufficiently evaluated, potentially…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Chenlong Yin , Runpeng Geng , Yanting Wang , Jinyuan Jia

Prepending model inputs with safety prompts is a common practice for safeguarding large language models (LLMs) against queries with harmful intents. However, the underlying working mechanisms of safety prompts have not been unraveled yet,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Chujie Zheng , Fan Yin , Hao Zhou , Fandong Meng , Jie Zhou , Kai-Wei Chang , Minlie Huang , Nanyun Peng

Batch reinforcement learning (RL) is important to apply RL algorithms to many high stakes tasks. Doing batch RL in a way that yields a reliable new policy in large domains is challenging: a new decision policy may visit states and actions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-23 Yao Liu , Adith Swaminathan , Alekh Agarwal , Emma Brunskill

Safety comes first in many real-world applications involving autonomous agents. Despite a large number of reinforcement learning (RL) methods focusing on safety-critical tasks, there is still a lack of high-quality evaluation of those…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-13 Linrui Zhang , Qin Zhang , Li Shen , Bo Yuan , Xueqian Wang , Dacheng Tao

Counterfactual learning to rank (CLTR) can be risky and, in various circumstances, can produce sub-optimal models that hurt performance when deployed. Safe CLTR was introduced to mitigate these risks when using inverse propensity scoring to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-17 Shashank Gupta , Harrie Oosterhuis , Maarten de Rijke

Safe exploration is a key requirement for reinforcement learning (RL) agents to learn and adapt online, beyond controlled (e.g. simulated) environments. In this work, we tackle this challenge by utilizing suboptimal yet conservative…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Manuel Wendl , Yarden As , Manish Prajapat , Anton Pollak , Stelian Coros , Andreas Krause