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We introduce a constrained optimization method for policy gradient reinforcement learning, which uses a virtual trust region to regulate each policy update. In addition to using the proximity of one single old policy as the normal trust…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-19 Hung Le , Thommen Karimpanal George , Majid Abdolshah , Dung Nguyen , Kien Do , Sunil Gupta , Svetha Venkatesh

The paradigm of robot-assisted surgery is shifting toward data-driven autonomy, where policies learned via Reinforcement Learning (RL) or Imitation Learning (IL) enable the execution of complex tasks. However, these ``black-box" policies…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Jianshu Hu , ZhiYuan Guan , Lei Song , Kantaphat Leelakunwet , Hesheng Wang , Wei Xiao , Qi Dou , Yutong Ban

Deep reinforcement learning algorithms can perform poorly in real-world tasks due to the discrepancy between source and target environments. This discrepancy is commonly viewed as the disturbance in transition dynamics. Many existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-21 Yufei Kuang , Miao Lu , Jie Wang , Qi Zhou , Bin Li , Houqiang Li

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) is crucial for deploying RL agents in real-world applications, as it aims to maximize long-term rewards while satisfying safety constraints. However, safe RL often suffers from sample inefficiency, requiring…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-03 Shangding Gu , Laixi Shi , Yuhao Ding , Alois Knoll , Costas Spanos , Adam Wierman , Ming Jin

Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved promising results on most robotic control tasks. Safety of learning-based controllers is an essential notion of ensuring the effectiveness of the controllers. Current methods adopt whole consistency…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-07-31 Haotian Xu , Shengjie Wang , Zhaolei Wang , Yunzhe Zhang , Qing Zhuo , Yang Gao , Tao Zhang

To apply reinforcement learning to safety-critical applications, we ought to provide safety guarantees during both policy training and deployment. In this work, we present theoretical results that place a bound on the probability of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-24 Jacques Cloete , Nikolaus Vertovec , Alessandro Abate

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

Leveraging planning during learning and decision-making is central to the long-term development of intelligent agents. Recent works have successfully combined tree-based search methods and self-play learning mechanisms to this end. However,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-11-01 Matthew V Macfarlane , Edan Toledo , Donal Byrne , Paul Duckworth , Alexandre Laterre

In constrained Markov decision processes, enforcing constraints during training is often thought of as decreasing the final return. Recently, it was shown that constraints can be incorporated directly into the policy geometry, yielding an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-18 Nikola Milosevic , Johannes Müller , Nico Scherf

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 reinforcement learning has been a promising approach for optimizing the policy of an agent that operates in safety-critical applications. In this paper, we propose an algorithm, SNO-MDP, that explores and optimizes Markov decision…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-18 Akifumi Wachi , Yanan Sui

Safe reinforcement learning aims to learn the optimal policy while satisfying safety constraints, which is essential in real-world applications. However, current algorithms still struggle for efficient policy updates with hard constraint…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-20 Linrui Zhang , Li Shen , Long Yang , Shixiang Chen , Bo Yuan , Xueqian Wang , Dacheng Tao

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

We introduce adaptive sampling methods for stochastic programs with deterministic constraints. First, we propose and analyze a variant of the stochastic projected gradient method where the sample size used to approximate the reduced…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-02-07 Florian Beiser , Brendan Keith , Simon Urbainczyk , Barbara Wohlmuth

We introduce the Value-at-Risk Constrained Policy Optimization algorithm (VaR-CPO), a sample efficient and conservative method designed to optimize Value-at-Risk (VaR) constrained reinforcement learning (RL) problems. Empirically, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-01 Rohan Tangri , Jan-Peter Calliess

Reinforcement learning (RL) is attracting increasing interests in autonomous driving due to its potential to solve complex classification and control problems. However, existing RL algorithms are rarely applied to real vehicles for two…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-04 Lu Wen , Jingliang Duan , Shengbo Eben Li , Shaobing Xu , Huei Peng

We consider controller synthesis for stochastic and partially unknown environments in which safety is essential. Specifically, we abstract the problem as a Markov decision process in which the expected performance is measured using a cost…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2015-10-21 Sebastian Junges , Nils Jansen , Christian Dehnert , Ufuk Topcu , Joost-Pieter Katoen

A significant portion of recent research on Large Language Model (LLM) alignment focuses on developing new policy optimization methods based on Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Two prominent directions have emerged: (i) a shift…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-27 Svetlana Glazyrina , Maksim Kryzhanovskiy , Roman Ischenko

Model-free reinforcement learning algorithms have seen remarkable progress, but key challenges remain. Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO) is known for ensuring monotonic policy improvement through conservative updates within a trust…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Zhengpeng Xie , Qiang Zhang , Fan Yang , Marco Hutter , Renjing Xu

Stochastic compositional optimization (SCO) has attracted considerable attention because of its broad applicability to important real-world problems. However, existing works on SCO assume that the projection within a solution update is…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-05-27 Shuoguang Yang , Wei You , Zhe Zhang , Ethan X. Fang