English
Related papers

Related papers: Constrained Policy Optimization via Sampling-Based…

200 papers

In this work, we focus on the problem of safe policy transfer in reinforcement learning: we seek to leverage existing policies when learning a new task with specified constraints. This problem is important for safety-critical applications…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-11 Zeyu Feng , Bowen Zhang , Jianxin Bi , Harold Soh

Although Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms have found tremendous success in simulated domains, they often cannot directly be applied to physical systems, especially in cases where there are hard constraints to satisfy (e.g. on safety…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-28 Harsh Satija , Philip Amortila , Joelle Pineau

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has become a standard paradigm for post-training large language models. While Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) is widely adopted, its coarse credit assignment uniformly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-03 Gengsheng Li , Tianyu Yang , Junfeng Fang , Mingyang Song , Mao Zheng , Haiyun Guo , Dan Zhang , Jinqiao Wang , Tat-Seng Chua

We introduce the notion of importance sampling under embedded barrier state control, titled Safety Controlled Model Predictive Path Integral Control (SC-MPPI). For robotic systems operating in an environment with multiple constraints, hard…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-03-08 Manan Gandhi , Hassan Almubarak , Evangelos Theodorou

Reinforcement learning is a widely used approach to autonomous navigation, showing potential in various tasks and robotic setups. Still, it often struggles to reach distant goals when safety constraints are imposed (e.g., the wheeled robot…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-08-27 Brian Angulo , Gregory Gorbov , Aleksandr Panov , Konstantin Yakovlev

Safety exploration can be regarded as a constrained Markov decision problem where the expected long-term cost is constrained. Previous off-policy algorithms convert the constrained optimization problem into the corresponding unconstrained…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-28 Hengrui Zhang , Youfang Lin , Sheng Han , Shuo Wang , Kai Lv

Constrained Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims to maximize the return while adhering to predefined constraint limits, which represent domain-specific safety requirements. In continuous control settings, where learning agents govern system…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-12 Somnath Hazra , Pallab Dasgupta , Soumyajit Dey

Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) dominates reinforcement learning and LLM alignment but relies on a "hard clipping" mechanism that discards valuable gradients. Conversely, unconstrained methods like SPO expose the optimization to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Yiheng Zhang , Yiming Wang , Kaiyan Zhao , Zhenglin Wan , Jiayu Chen , Leong Hou U

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-17 Ashish Kumar Jayant , Shalabh Bhatnagar

We propose a new family of policy gradient methods for reinforcement learning, which alternate between sampling data through interaction with the environment, and optimizing a "surrogate" objective function using stochastic gradient ascent.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-08-29 John Schulman , Filip Wolski , Prafulla Dhariwal , Alec Radford , Oleg Klimov

Safety is essential for reinforcement learning (RL) applied in real-world situations. Chance constraints are suitable to represent the safety requirements in stochastic systems. Previous chance-constrained RL methods usually have a low…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-17 Baiyu Peng , Yao Mu , Yang Guan , Shengbo Eben Li , Yuming Yin , Jianyu Chen

Reinforcement learning with verifiable reward has recently emerged as a central paradigm for post-training large language models (LLMs); however, prevailing mean-based methods, such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), suffer from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Tao Ren , Jinyang Jiang , Hui Yang , Wan Tian , Minhao Zou , Guanghao Li , Zishi Zhang , Qinghao Wang , Shentao Qin , Yanjun Zhao , Rui Tao , Hui Shao , Yijie Peng

Safe reinforcement learning (safe RL) aims to respect safety requirements while optimizing long-term performance. In many practical applications, however, the problem involves an infinite number of constraints, known as semi-infinite safe…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-07 Jiaming Zhang , Yujie Yang , Haoning Wang , Liping Zhang , Shengbo Eben Li

We study continuous action reinforcement learning problems in which it is crucial that the agent interacts with the environment only through safe policies, i.e.,~policies that do not take the agent to undesirable situations. We formulate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-13 Yinlam Chow , Ofir Nachum , Aleksandra Faust , Edgar Duenez-Guzman , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh

In safe offline reinforcement learning (RL), the objective is to develop a policy that maximizes cumulative rewards while strictly adhering to safety constraints, utilizing only offline data. Traditional methods often face difficulties in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Prajwal Koirala , Zhanhong Jiang , Soumik Sarkar , Cody Fleming

Proximal policy optimization (PPO) is one of the most successful deep reinforcement-learning methods, achieving state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of challenging tasks. However, its optimization behavior is still far from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-15 Yuhui Wang , Hao He , Chao Wen , Xiaoyang Tan

We propose a sampling-based trajectory optimization methodology for constrained problems. We extend recent works on stochastic search to deal with box control constraints,as well as nonlinear state constraints for discrete dynamical…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-11-13 George I. Boutselis , Ziyi Wang , Evangelos A. Theodorou

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

Learning-based control algorithms require data collection with abundant supervision for training. Safe exploration algorithms ensure the safety of this data collection process even when only partial knowledge is available. We present a new…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-10-29 Yashwanth Kumar Nakka , Anqi Liu , Guanya Shi , Anima Anandkumar , Yisong Yue , Soon-Jo Chung

Improving sample-efficiency and safety are crucial challenges when deploying reinforcement learning in high-stakes real world applications. We propose LAMBDA, a novel model-based approach for policy optimization in safety critical tasks…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-08 Yarden As , Ilnura Usmanova , Sebastian Curi , Andreas Krause