English
Related papers

Related papers: Safe-Support Q-Learning: Learning without Unsafe E…

200 papers

During initial iterations of training in most Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms, agents perform a significant number of random exploratory steps. In the real world, this can limit the practicality of these algorithms as it can lead to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-17 Ashish Kumar Jayant , Shalabh Bhatnagar

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

We propose a framework for ensuring safe behavior of a reinforcement learning agent when the reward function may be difficult to specify. In order to do this, we rely on the existence of demonstrations from expert policies, and we provide a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-22 Jessie Huang , Fa Wu , Doina Precup , Yang Cai

Given the availability of more comprehensive measurement data in modern power systems, reinforcement learning (RL) has gained significant interest in operation and control. Conventional RL relies on trial-and-error interactions with the…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-07-01 Tong Su , Tong Wu , Junbo Zhao , Anna Scaglione , Le Xie

Reinforcement Learning (RL) applications in real-world scenarios must prioritize safety and reliability, which impose strict constraints on agent behavior. Model-based RL leverages predictive world models for action planning and policy…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Artem Latyshev , Gregory Gorbov , Aleksandr I. Panov

Recent rapid developments in reinforcement learning algorithms have been giving us novel possibilities in many fields. However, due to their exploring property, we have to take the risk into consideration when we apply those algorithms to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-21 Yoshihiro Okawa , Tomotake Sasaki , Hitoshi Yanami , Toru Namerikawa

Safety comes first in many real-world applications involving autonomous agents. Despite a large number of reinforcement learning (RL) methods focusing on safety-critical tasks, there is still a lack of high-quality evaluation of those…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-13 Linrui Zhang , Qin Zhang , Li Shen , Bo Yuan , Xueqian Wang , Dacheng Tao

Reinforcement learning has been successfully used to solve difficult tasks in complex unknown environments. However, these methods typically do not provide any safety guarantees during the learning process. This is particularly problematic,…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2019-07-02 Torsten Koller , Felix Berkenkamp , Matteo Turchetta , Joschka Boedecker , Andreas Krause

The deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) in decision-making applications requires ensuring an appropriate level of safety and reliability, particularly in changing environments that contain a large number of unknown observations. To…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-06 Leen Kweider , Maissa Abou Kassem , Ubai Sandouk

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 reinforcement learning is a promising path toward applying reinforcement learning algorithms to real-world problems, where suboptimal behaviors may lead to actual negative consequences. In this work, we focus on the setting where…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-17 Garrett Thomas , Yuping Luo , Tengyu Ma

We develop a framework for interacting with uncertain environments in reinforcement learning (RL) by leveraging preferences in the form of utility functions. We claim that there is value in considering different risk measures during…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-23 Hannes Eriksson , Christos Dimitrakakis

One of the key challenges to deep reinforcement learning (deep RL) is to ensure safety at both training and testing phases. In this work, we propose a novel technique of unsupervised action planning to improve the safety of on-policy…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-09-30 Hao-Lun Hsu , Qiuhua Huang , Sehoon Ha

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

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

Safe Reinforcement Learning (RL) is crucial for achieving high performance while ensuring safety in real-world applications. However, the complex interplay of multiple uncertainty sources in real environments poses significant challenges…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Xu Wan , Chao Yang , Cheng Yang , Jie Song , Mingyang Sun

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

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) seeks to mitigate unsafe behaviors that arise from exploration during training by reducing constraint violations while maintaining task performance. Existing approaches typically rely on a single policy to…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Murad Dawood , Usama Ahmed Siddiquie , Shahram Khorshidi , Maren Bennewitz

Several works have addressed the problem of incorporating constraints in the reinforcement learning (RL) framework, however majority of them can only guarantee the satisfaction of soft constraints. In this work, we address the problem of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-16 Kwangyeon Kim , Akshita Gupta , Hong-Cheol Choi , Inseok Hwang

Exploration is essential for reinforcement learning (RL). To face the challenges of exploration, we consider a reward-free RL framework that completely separates exploration from exploitation and brings new challenges for exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-11 Chuheng Zhang , Yuanying Cai , Longbo Huang , Jian Li