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Related papers: SafeAdapt: Provably Safe Policy Updates in Deep Re…

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Deploying deep reinforcement learning in safety-critical settings requires developing algorithms that obey hard constraints during exploration. This paper contributes a first approach toward enforcing formal safety constraints on end-to-end…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-07-03 Nathan Hunt , Nathan Fulton , Sara Magliacane , Nghia Hoang , Subhro Das , Armando Solar-Lezama

Due to limited resources and public safety concerns, deep reinforcement learning (RL) agents for many cyber-physical systems (e.g., autonomous vehicles) are first trained in simulators. However, when deployed in real world environments,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Gengyue Han , Yiheng Feng

Real-world reinforcement learning (RL) problems often demand that agents behave safely by obeying a set of designed constraints. We address the challenge of safe RL by coupling a safety guide based on model predictive control (MPC) with a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-30 Samuel Pfrommer , Tanmay Gautam , Alec Zhou , Somayeh Sojoudi

The desire to use reinforcement learning in safety-critical settings has inspired a recent interest in formal methods for learning algorithms. Existing formal methods for learning and optimization primarily consider the problem of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-06-05 Nathan Fulton , Andre Platzer

This paper presents the concept of an adaptive safe padding that forces Reinforcement Learning (RL) to synthesise optimal control policies while ensuring safety during the learning process. Policies are synthesised to satisfy a goal,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-24 Mohammadhosein Hasanbeig , Alessandro Abate , Daniel Kroening

Safety is a critical feature of controller design for physical systems. When designing control policies, several approaches to guarantee this aspect of autonomy have been proposed, such as robust controllers or control barrier functions.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-26 Miguel Calvo-Fullana , Luiz F. O. Chamon , Santiago Paternain

We consider the challenge of policy simplification and verification in the context of policies learned through reinforcement learning (RL) in continuous environments. In well-behaved settings, RL algorithms have convergence guarantees in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-15 Florent Delgrange , Ann Nowé , Guillermo A. Pérez

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has demonstrated remarkable performance in many continuous control tasks. However, a significant obstacle to the real-world application of DRL is the lack of safety guarantees. Although DRL agents can…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-08-15 Weiye Zhao , Feihan Li , Changliu Liu

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

Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown promise in addressing complex robotic challenges. In real-world applications, RL is often accompanied by failsafe controllers as a last resort to avoid catastrophic events. While necessary for…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-09-26 Jakob Thumm , Guillaume Pelat , Matthias Althoff

The study of provable adversarial robustness for deep neural networks (DNNs) has mainly focused on static supervised learning tasks such as image classification. However, DNNs have been used extensively in real-world adaptive tasks such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-31 Aounon Kumar , Alexander Levine , Soheil Feizi

In offline reinforcement learning (RL), we learn policies from fixed datasets without environment interaction. The major challenges are to provide guarantees on the (1) performance and (2) safety of the resulting policy. A technique called…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Maris F. L. Galesloot , Thomas Rhemrev , Nils Jansen

Safety is one of the biggest concerns to applying reinforcement learning (RL) to the physical world. In its core part, it is challenging to ensure RL agents persistently satisfy a hard state constraint without white-box or black-box…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-10-19 Weiye Zhao , Tairan He , Changliu Liu

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms can achieve state-of-the-art performance in decision-making and continuous control tasks. However, applying RL algorithms on safety-critical systems still needs to be well justified due to the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-11-22 Mahmoud Selim , Amr Alanwar , M. Watheq El-Kharashi , Hazem M. Abbas , Karl H. Johansson

The deployment of autonomous robots in safety-critical applications requires safety guarantees. Provably safe reinforcement learning is an active field of research that aims to provide such guarantees using safeguards. These safeguards…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Tim Walter , Hannah Markgraf , Jonathan Külz , Matthias Althoff

Reinforcement learning (RL) agents need to be robust to variations in safety-critical environments. While system identification methods provide a way to infer the variation from online experience, they can fail in settings where fast…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-07 Annie Xie , Shagun Sodhani , Chelsea Finn , Joelle Pineau , Amy Zhang

Safety is a critical component of autonomous systems and remains a challenge for learning-based policies to be utilized in the real world. In particular, policies learned using reinforcement learning often fail to generalize to novel…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-04-04 Kai-Chieh Hsu , Allen Z. Ren , Duy Phuong Nguyen , Anirudha Majumdar , Jaime F. Fisac

Safety is the priority concern when applying reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms to real-world control problems. While policy iteration provides a fundamental algorithm for standard RL, an analogous theoretical algorithm for safe RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-14 Yujie Yang , Zhilong Zheng , Shengbo Eben Li , Wei Xu , Jingjing Liu , Xianyuan Zhan , Ya-Qin Zhang

Offline Safe Reinforcement Learning (RL) seeks to address safety constraints by learning from static datasets and restricting exploration. However, these approaches heavily rely on the dataset and struggle to generalize to unseen scenarios…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Chenyang Cao , Yucheng Xin , Silang Wu , Longxiang He , Zichen Yan , Junbo Tan , Xueqian Wang

Learning a risk-aware policy is essential but rather challenging in unstructured robotic tasks. Safe reinforcement learning methods open up new possibilities to tackle this problem. However, the conservative policy updates make it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-15 Linrui Zhang , Zichen Yan , Li Shen , Shoujie Li , Xueqian Wang , Dacheng Tao