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As autonomous systems become more ubiquitous in daily life, ensuring high performance with guaranteed safety is crucial. However, safety and performance could be competing objectives, which makes their co-optimization difficult.…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Manan Tayal , Aditya Singh , Shishir Kolathaya , Somil Bansal

A longstanding goal in safe reinforcement learning (RL) is a method to ensure the safety of a policy throughout the entire process, from learning to operation. However, existing safe RL paradigms inherently struggle to achieve this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Akifumi Wachi , Kohei Miyaguchi , Takumi Tanabe , Rei Sato , Youhei Akimoto

While learning in an unknown Markov Decision Process (MDP), an agent should trade off exploration to discover new information about the MDP, and exploitation of the current knowledge to maximize the reward. Although the agent will…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-16 Evrard Garcelon , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Alessandro Lazaric , Matteo Pirotta

Providing a suitable reward function to reinforcement learning can be difficult in many real world applications. While inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) holds promise for automatically learning reward functions from demonstrations,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-29 Lantao Yu , Tianhe Yu , Chelsea Finn , Stefano Ermon

We introduce a simple but effective method for managing risk in model-based reinforcement learning with trajectory sampling that involves probabilistic safety constraints and balancing of optimism in the face of epistemic uncertainty and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-12 Marin Vlastelica , Sebastian Blaes , Cristina Pineri , Georg Martius

Clinical decision-making often involves selecting tests that are costly, invasive, or time-consuming, motivating individualized, sequential strategies for what to measure and when to stop ascertaining. We study the problem of learning…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-16 Doudou Zhou , Yiran Zhang , Dian Jin , Yingye Zheng , Lu Tian , Tianxi Cai

We propose to leverage epistemic uncertainty about constraint satisfaction of a reinforcement learner in safety critical domains. We introduce a framework for specification of requirements for reinforcement learners in constrained settings,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-02-09 Lenz Belzner , Martin Wirsing

Ensuring safety is a crucial challenge when deploying reinforcement learning (RL) to real-world systems. We develop confidence-based safety filters, a control-theoretic approach for certifying state safety constraints for nominal policies…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-05 Sebastian Curi , Armin Lederer , Sandra Hirche , Andreas Krause

Recent advances in Deep Machine Learning have shown promise in solving complex perception and control loops via methods such as reinforcement and imitation learning. However, guaranteeing safety for such learned deep policies has been a…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-03-03 Tom Hirshberg , Sai Vemprala , Ashish Kapoor

Safe exploration aims at addressing the limitations of Reinforcement Learning (RL) in safety-critical scenarios, where failures during trial-and-error learning may incur high costs. Several methods exist to incorporate external knowledge or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-13 Xiaotong Ji , Antonio Filieri

This paper studies constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs) with constraints against stochastic thresholds, aiming at safety of reinforcement learning in unknown and uncertain environments. We leverage a Growing-Window estimator…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-25 Qian Zuo , Fengxiang He

We consider the problem of learning by demonstration from agents acting in unknown stochastic Markov environments or games. Our aim is to estimate agent preferences in order to construct improved policies for the same task that the agents…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-08-12 Aristide Tossou , Christos Dimitrakakis

We consider the problem of learning by demonstration from agents acting in unknown stochastic Markov environments or games. Our aim is to estimate agent preferences in order to construct improved policies for the same task that the agents…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2013-07-16 Aristide C. Y. Tossou , Christos Dimitrakakis

One of the main challenges in imitation learning is determining what action an agent should take when outside the state distribution of the demonstrations. Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) can enable generalization to new states by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-04 Daniel S. Brown , Scott Niekum , Marek Petrik

Reinforcement Learning (RL) for control has become increasingly popular due to its ability to learn rich feedback policies that take into account uncertainty and complex representations of the environment. When considering safety…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-21 Sean Vaskov , Wilko Schwarting , Chris L. Baker

Reinforcement learning (RL) presents a promising framework to learn policies through environment interaction, but often requires an infeasible amount of interaction data to solve complex tasks from sparse rewards. One direction includes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-07 Stone Tao , Arth Shukla , Tse-kai Chan , Hao Su

Ensuring the safety of reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms is crucial to unlock their potential for many real-world tasks. However, vanilla RL and most safe RL approaches do not guarantee safety. In recent years, several methods have…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-21 Hanna Krasowski , Jakob Thumm , Marlon Müller , Lukas Schäfer , Xiao Wang , Matthias Althoff

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…

Ensuring safety via safety filters in real-world robotics presents significant challenges, particularly when the system dynamics is complex or unavailable. To handle this issue, learning-based safety filters recently gained popularity,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-12-02 Guo Ning Sue , Yogita Choudhary , Richard Desatnik , Carmel Majidi , John Dolan , Guanya Shi

In the field of reinforcement learning there has been recent progress towards safety and high-confidence bounds on policy performance. However, to our knowledge, no practical methods exist for determining high-confidence policy performance…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-06-26 Daniel S. Brown , Scott Niekum