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Random exploration is one of the main mechanisms through which reinforcement learning (RL) finds well-performing policies. However, it can lead to undesirable or catastrophic outcomes when learning online in safety-critical environments. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-15 Djordje Grbic , Sebastian Risi

Agentic reinforcement learning (RL) trains large language models to autonomously call tools during reasoning, with search as the most common application. These models excel at multi-step reasoning tasks, but their safety properties are not…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Yushi Yang , Shreyansh Padarha , Andrew Lee , Adam Mahdi

The deployment of Reinforcement Learning (RL) in real-world applications is constrained by its failure to satisfy safety criteria. Existing Safe Reinforcement Learning (SafeRL) methods, which rely on cost functions to enforce safety, often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-09 Weidong Huang , Jiaming Ji , Chunhe Xia , Borong Zhang , Yaodong Yang

Deployment of Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms for robotics applications in the real world requires ensuring the safety of the robot and its environment. Safe Robot RL (SRRL) is a crucial step towards achieving human-robot…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-10-18 Shangding Gu , Alap Kshirsagar , Yali Du , Guang Chen , Jan Peters , Alois Knoll

Sequential decision making using Markov Decision Process underpins many realworld applications. Both model-based and model free methods have achieved strong results in these settings. However, real-world tasks must balance reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-01 Janaka Chathuranga Brahmanage , Akshat Kumar

We study offline reinforcement learning (RL) which seeks to learn a good policy based on a fixed, pre-collected dataset. A fundamental challenge behind this task is the distributional shift due to the dataset lacking sufficient exploration,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-11 Wenzhuo Zhou

Unsupervised reinforcement learning (RL) studies how to leverage environment statistics to learn useful behaviors without the cost of reward engineering. However, a central challenge in unsupervised RL is to extract behaviors that…

The exploration-exploitation dilemma in reinforcement learning (RL) is a fundamental challenge to efficient RL algorithms. Existing algorithms for finite state and action discounted RL problems address this by assuming sufficient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Caleb Ju , Guanghui Lan

Soft Q-learning has emerged as a versatile model-free method for entropy-regularised reinforcement learning, optimising for returns augmented with a penalty on the divergence from a reference policy. Despite its success, the multi-step…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Pranav Mahajan , Ben Seymour

Safety is a crucial property of every robotic platform: any control policy should always comply with actuator limits and avoid collisions with the environment and humans. In reinforcement learning, safety is even more fundamental for…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-03-02 Puze Liu , Kuo Zhang , Davide Tateo , Snehal Jauhri , Zhiyuan Hu , Jan Peters , Georgia Chalvatzaki

Model-based reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising tool for developing controllers for real world systems (e.g., robotics, autonomous driving, etc.). However, real systems often have constraints imposed on their state space…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-22 Akshita Gupta , Inseok Hwang

In many real world applications, reinforcement learning agents have to optimize multiple objectives while following certain rules or satisfying a list of constraints. Classical methods based on reward shaping, i.e. a weighted combination of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-15 Gabriel Kalweit , Maria Huegle , Moritz Werling , Joschka Boedecker

Ensuring strict safety guarantees is the paramount challenge for emerging 5G/6G wireless systems, particularly as they increasingly govern mission-critical applications ranging from autonomous UAV swarms to industrial automation. While deep…

Signal Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-04-21 Haoran Peng , Tong Wu , Hang Liu , Weijia Zheng , Ying-Jun Angela Zhang , Anna Scaglione

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) agents accomplish given tasks while adhering to specific constraints. Employing constraints expressed via easily-understandable human language offers considerable potential for real-world applications due to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-16 Xingzhou Lou , Junge Zhang , Ziyan Wang , Kaiqi Huang , Yali Du

Model-free reinforcement learning based methods such as Proximal Policy Optimization, or Q-learning typically require thousands of interactions with the environment to approximate the optimum controller which may not always be feasible in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-16 Narendra Patwardhan , Zequn Wang

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) often leverage Reinforcement Learning (RL) techniques to adapt dynamically to changing environments and optimize performance. However, it is challenging to construct safety cases for RL components. We therefore…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-03-13 Katherine Dearstyne , Pedro , Alarcon Granadeno , Theodore Chambers , Jane Cleland-Huang

Real-world applications require RL algorithms to act safely. During learning process, it is likely that the agent executes sub-optimal actions that may lead to unsafe/poor states of the system. Exploration is particularly brittle in…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-06-17 Elena Smirnova , Elvis Dohmatob , Jérémie Mary

In reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms, exploratory control inputs are used during learning to acquire knowledge for decision making and control, while the true dynamics of a controlled object is unknown. However, this exploring property…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-08 Yoshihiro Okawa , Tomotake Sasaki , Hidenao Iwane

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown promise in various robotics applications, yet its deployment on real systems is still limited due to safety and operational constraints. The safe RL field has gained considerable attention in recent…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-19 Sadık Bera Yüksel , Ali Tevfik Buyukkocak , Derya Aksaray

Reinforcement learning (RL) is an effective approach to motion planning in autonomous driving, where an optimal driving policy can be automatically learned using the interaction data with the environment. Nevertheless, the reward function…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-08-28 Lin-Chi Wu , Zengjie Zhang , Sofie Haesaert , Zhiqiang Ma , Zhiyong Sun