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When safety is formulated as a limit of cumulative cost, safe reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn policies that maximize return subject to the cost constraint in data collection and deployment. Off-policy safe RL methods, although…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-26 Guopeng Li , Matthijs T. J. Spaan , Julian F. P. Kooij

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) trains a policy to maximize the task reward while satisfying safety constraints. While prior works focus on the performance optimality, we find that the optimal solutions of many safe RL problems are not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-03 Zuxin Liu , Zijian Guo , Zhepeng Cen , Huan Zhang , Jie Tan , Bo Li , Ding Zhao

The primary goal of reinforcement learning is to develop decision-making policies that prioritize optimal performance without considering risk or safety. In contrast, safe reinforcement learning aims to mitigate or avoid unsafe states. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-13 Zahra Shahrooei , Ali Baheri

Given a set of trajectories demonstrating the execution of a task safely in a constrained MDP with observable rewards but with unknown constraints and non-observable costs, we aim to find a policy that maximizes the likelihood of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-02 George Papadopoulos , George A. Vouros

Designing control policies for legged locomotion is complex due to the under-actuated and non-continuous robot dynamics. Model-free reinforcement learning provides promising tools to tackle this challenge. However, a major bottleneck of…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-03-08 Tsung-Yen Yang , Tingnan Zhang , Linda Luu , Sehoon Ha , Jie Tan , Wenhao Yu

Safe and efficient autonomous driving maneuvers in an interactive and complex environment can be considerably challenging due to the unpredictable actions of other surrounding agents that may be cooperative or adversarial in their…

Robotics · Computer Science 2019-01-28 Pin Wang , Ching-Yao Chan , Hanhan Li

Reinforcement learning (RL) has been successfully applied to a variety of robotics applications, where it outperforms classical methods. However, the safety aspect of RL and the transfer to the real world remain an open challenge. A…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-04-21 Murad Dawood , Ahmed Shokry , Maren Bennewitz

We study the problem of safe offline reinforcement learning (RL), the goal is to learn a policy that maximizes long-term reward while satisfying safety constraints given only offline data, without further interaction with the environment.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-11 Haoran Xu , Xianyuan Zhan , Xiangyu Zhu

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

We address the problem of deploying a reinforcement learning (RL) agent on a physical system such as a datacenter cooling unit or robot, where critical constraints must never be violated. We show how to exploit the typically smooth dynamics…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-01-29 Gal Dalal , Krishnamurthy Dvijotham , Matej Vecerik , Todd Hester , Cosmin Paduraru , Yuval Tassa

An important facet of reinforcement learning (RL) has to do with how the agent goes about exploring the environment. Traditional exploration strategies typically focus on efficiency and ignore safety. However, for practical applications,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-04-23 Jiameng Fan , Wenchao Li

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…

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful data-driven control method that has been largely explored in autonomous driving tasks. However, conventional RL approaches learn control policies through trial-and-error interactions with the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-11-03 Tianyu Shi , Dong Chen , Kaian Chen , Zhaojian Li

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

Due to the nature of risk management in learning applicable policies, risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RSRL) has been realized as an important direction. RSRL is usually achieved by learning risk-sensitive objectives characterized by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Ruiwen Zhou , Minghuan Liu , Kan Ren , Xufang Luo , Weinan Zhang , Dongsheng Li

Reinforcement learning has been established over the past decade as an effective tool to find optimal control policies for dynamical systems, with recent focus on approaches that guarantee safety during the learning and/or execution phases.…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-10-06 S M Nahid Mahmud , Scott A Nivison , Zachary I. Bell , Rushikesh Kamalapurkar

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) that solves constraint-satisfactory policies provides a promising way to the broader safety-critical applications of RL in real-world problems such as robotics. Among all safe RL approaches, model-based…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-10-17 Dongjie Yu , Wenjun Zou , Yujie Yang , Haitong Ma , Shengbo Eben Li , Jingliang Duan , Jianyu Chen

This paper proposes a safe reinforcement learning (RL) framework based on forward-invariance-induced action-space design. The control problem is cast as a Markov decision process, but instead of relying on runtime shielding or penalty-based…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-04-10 Chieh Tsai , Muhammad Junayed Hasan Zahed , Salim Hariri , Hossein Rastgoftar

Emerging applications in robotics and autonomous systems, such as autonomous driving and robotic surgery, often involve critical safety constraints that must be satisfied even when information about system models is limited. In this regard,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-02-25 Subin Huh , Insoon Yang

We present Revel, a partially neural reinforcement learning (RL) framework for provably safe exploration in continuous state and action spaces. A key challenge for provably safe deep RL is that repeatedly verifying neural networks within a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-27 Greg Anderson , Abhinav Verma , Isil Dillig , Swarat Chaudhuri