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Related papers: Safe Exploration via Policy Priors

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Ensuring safety during reinforcement learning (RL) training is critical in real-world applications where unsafe exploration can lead to devastating outcomes. While most safe RL methods mitigate risk through constraints or penalization, they…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-29 Yeeun Lim , Narim Jeong , Donghwan Lee

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

Safety remains a central obstacle preventing widespread use of RL in the real world: learning new tasks in uncertain environments requires extensive exploration, but safety requires limiting exploration. We propose Recovery RL, an algorithm…

Safe reinforcement learning (SafeRL) is a prominent paradigm for autonomous driving, where agents are required to optimize performance under strict safety requirements. This dual objective creates a fundamental tension, as overly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-24 Mahesh Keswani , Raunak Bhattacharyya

Recent advancements in deep reinforcement learning (RL) have demonstrated notable progress in sample efficiency, spanning both model-based and model-free paradigms. Despite the identification and mitigation of specific bottlenecks in prior…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Yibo Wang , Jiang Zhao

We present a new model-based algorithm for reinforcement learning (RL) which consists of explicit exploration and exploitation phases, and is applicable in large or infinite state spaces. The algorithm maintains a set of dynamics models…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-03 Mikael Henaff

Achieving both optimality and safety under unknown system dynamics is a central challenge in real-world deployment of agents. To address this, we introduce a notion of maximum safe dynamics learning, where sufficient exploration is…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-02-24 Manish Prajapat , Johannes Köhler , Melanie N. Zeilinger , Andreas Krause

Exploration in environments with sparse rewards remains a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). Existing approaches such as curriculum learning and Go-Explore often rely on hand-crafted heuristics, while curiosity-driven…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Georgios Sotirchos , Zlatan Ajanović , Jens Kober

Intelligent agents rely heavily on prior experience when learning a new task, yet most modern reinforcement learning (RL) approaches learn every task from scratch. One approach for leveraging prior knowledge is to transfer skills learned on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-23 Karl Pertsch , Youngwoon Lee , Joseph J. Lim

Reinforcement learning (RL) agents need to explore their environments in order to learn optimal policies. In many environments and tasks, safety is of critical importance. The widespread use of simulators offers a number of advantages,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-03-01 Luka Kovač , Igor Farkaš

The practical application of learning agents requires sample efficient and interpretable algorithms. Learning from behavioral priors is a promising way to bootstrap agents with a better-than-random exploration policy or a safe-guard against…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-07-08 Shivansh Beohar , Andrew Melnik

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

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

We study offline reinforcement learning (RL) which seeks to learn a good policy based on a fixed, pre-collected dataset. A fundamental challenge behind this task is the distributional shift due to the dataset lacking sufficient exploration,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-11 Wenzhuo Zhou

Many potential applications of reinforcement learning (RL) are stymied by the large numbers of samples required to learn an effective policy. This is especially true when applying RL to real-world control tasks, e.g. in the sciences or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-11 Viraj Mehta , Ian Char , Joseph Abbate , Rory Conlin , Mark D. Boyer , Stefano Ermon , Jeff Schneider , Willie Neiswanger

A default assumption in the design of reinforcement-learning algorithms is that a decision-making agent always explores to learn optimal behavior. In sufficiently complex environments that approach the vastness and scale of the real world,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-23 Dilip Arumugam , Saurabh Kumar , Ramki Gummadi , Benjamin Van Roy

Safe reinforcement learning (Safe RL) aims to ensure policy performance while satisfying safety constraints. However, most existing Safe RL methods assume benign environments, making them vulnerable to adversarial perturbations commonly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-19 Jialiang Fan , Shixiong Jiang , Mengyu Liu , Fanxin Kong

In this paper, we study the learning of safe policies in the setting of reinforcement learning problems. This is, we aim to control a Markov Decision Process (MDP) of which we do not know the transition probabilities, but we have access to…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-01-14 Santiago Paternain , Miguel Calvo-Fullana , Luiz F. O. Chamon , Alejandro Ribeiro

In reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms, exploratory control inputs are used during learning to acquire knowledge for decision making and control, while the true dynamics of a controlled object is unknown. However, this exploring property…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-08 Yoshihiro Okawa , Tomotake Sasaki , Hidenao Iwane

Safe reinforcement learning is extremely challenging--not only must the agent explore an unknown environment, it must do so while ensuring no safety constraint violations. We formulate this safe reinforcement learning (RL) problem using the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-19 Archana Bura , Aria HasanzadeZonuzy , Dileep Kalathil , Srinivas Shakkottai , Jean-Francois Chamberland