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Incomplete knowledge of the environment leads an agent to make decisions under uncertainty. One of the major dilemmas in Reinforcement Learning (RL) where an autonomous agent has to balance two contrasting needs in making its decisions is:…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-02-21 Valentina Zangirolami , Matteo Borrotti

A key challenge in applying reinforcement learning to safety-critical domains is understanding how to balance exploration (needed to attain good performance on the task) with safety (needed to avoid catastrophic failure). Although a growing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-23 Melrose Roderick , Vaishnavh Nagarajan , J. Zico Kolter

Safe exploration presents a major challenge in reinforcement learning (RL): when active data collection requires deploying partially trained policies, we must ensure that these policies avoid catastrophically unsafe regions, while still…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-27 Homanga Bharadhwaj , Aviral Kumar , Nicholas Rhinehart , Sergey Levine , Florian Shkurti , Animesh Garg

The quest for optimal operation in environments with unknowns and uncertainties is highly desirable but critically challenging across numerous fields. This paper develops a dual control framework for exploration and exploitation (DCEE) to…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-03-13 Zhongguo Li , Wen-Hua Chen , Jun Yang , Yunda Yan

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

Safe exploration is a common problem in reinforcement learning (RL) that aims to prevent agents from making disastrous decisions while exploring their environment. A family of approaches to this problem assume domain knowledge in the form…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-08-24 Steven Carr , Nils Jansen , Sebastian Junges , Ufuk Topcu

Human expectations arise from their understanding of others and the world. In the context of human-AI interaction, this understanding may not align with reality, leading to the AI agent failing to meet expectations and compromising team…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-04-01 Akkamahadevi Hanni , Andrew Boateng , Yu Zhang

Training a model-free reinforcement learning agent requires allowing the agent to sufficiently explore the environment to search for an optimal policy. In safety-constrained environments, utilizing unsupervised exploration or a non-optimal…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-08-05 Erfan Entezami , Mahsa Sahebdel , Dhawal Gupta

Soft robots offer unmatched adaptability and safety in unstructured environments, yet their compliant, high-dimensional, and nonlinear dynamics make modeling for control notoriously difficult. Existing data-driven approaches often fail to…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-11-03 Hehui Zheng , Bhavya Sukhija , Chenhao Li , Klemens Iten , Andreas Krause , Robert K. Katzschmann

Reinforcement learning systems are often concerned with balancing exploration of untested actions against exploitation of actions that are known to be good. The benefit of exploration can be estimated using the classical notion of Value of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2013-01-30 Richard Dearden , Nir Friedman , David Andre

Exploration in unknown environments is a fundamental problem in reinforcement learning and control. In this work, we study task-guided exploration and determine what precisely an agent must learn about their environment in order to complete…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-13 Andrew Wagenmaker , Max Simchowitz , Kevin Jamieson

Reward-free reinforcement learning (RF-RL), a recently introduced RL paradigm, relies on random action-taking to explore the unknown environment without any reward feedback information. While the primary goal of the exploration phase in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-23 Ruiquan Huang , Jing Yang , Yingbin Liang

Designing provably safe control is a core problem in trustworthy autonomy. However, most prior work in this regard assumes either that the system dynamics are known or deterministic, or that the state and action space are finite,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Xinhang Ma , Junlin Wu , Yiannis Kantaros , Yevgeniy Vorobeychik

Constrained reinforcement learning (CRL) has gained significant interest recently, since safety constraints satisfaction is critical for real-world problems. However, existing CRL methods constraining discounted cumulative costs generally…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-08 Dongjie Yu , Haitong Ma , Shengbo Eben Li , Jianyu Chen

Safe reinforcement learning (SafeRL) extends standard reinforcement learning with the idea of safety, where safety is typically defined through the constraint of the expected cost return of a trajectory being below a set limit. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-04 David Eckel , Baohe Zhang , Joschka Bödecker

Exploration-exploitation of functions, that is learning and optimizing a mapping between inputs and expected outputs, is ubiquitous to many real world situations. These situations sometimes require us to avoid certain outcomes at all cost,…

Applications · Statistics 2016-05-17 Eric Schulz , Quentin J. M. Huys , Dominik R. Bach , Maarten Speekenbrink , Andreas Krause

Safe exploration is a key to applying reinforcement learning (RL) in safety-critical systems. Existing safe exploration methods guaranteed safety under the assumption of regularity, and it has been difficult to apply them to large-scale…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-10 Akifumi Wachi , Yunyue Wei , Yanan Sui

Safety is one of the main challenges in applying reinforcement learning to realistic environmental tasks. To ensure safety during and after training process, existing methods tend to adopt overly conservative policy to avoid unsafe…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-27 Xiao Zhang , Hai Zhang , Hongtu Zhou , Chang Huang , Di Zhang , Chen Ye , Junqiao Zhao

Adaptive exploration methods propose ways to learn complex policies via alternating between exploration and exploitation. An important question for such methods is to determine the appropriate moment to switch between exploration and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Leonidas Bakopoulos , Georgios Chalkiadakis

Accurate reconstruction of the environment is a central goal of Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) systems. However, the agent's trajectory can significantly affect estimation accuracy. This paper presents a new method to model…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-06-24 Sebastian Sansoni , Javier Gimenez , Gastón Castro , Santiago Tosetti , Flavio Craparo