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Related papers: Counterfactually Safe Reinforcement Learning

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Reinforcement learning has been shown to perform a range of complex tasks through interaction with an environment or collected leveraging experience. However, many of these approaches presume optimal or near optimal experiences or the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-21 Chapman Siu , Jason Traish , Richard Yi Da Xu

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn policies that satisfy certain constraints before deploying them to safety-critical applications. Previous primal-dual style approaches suffer from instability issues and lack optimality…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-20 Zuxin Liu , Zhepeng Cen , Vladislav Isenbaev , Wei Liu , Zhiwei Steven Wu , Bo Li , Ding Zhao

Although learning-based methods have great potential for robotics, one concern is that a robot that updates its parameters might cause large amounts of damage before it learns the optimal policy. We formalize the idea of safe learning in a…

Robotics · Computer Science 2017-05-17 David Held , Zoe McCarthy , Michael Zhang , Fred Shentu , Pieter Abbeel

We study a security threat to reinforcement learning where an attacker poisons the learning environment to force the agent into executing a target policy chosen by the attacker. As a victim, we consider RL agents whose objective is to find…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-20 Amin Rakhsha , Goran Radanovic , Rati Devidze , Xiaojin Zhu , Adish Singla

Reinforcement learning (RL) policies may exhibit unsafe behavior and are hard to explain. We use counterfactual large language model reasoning to enhance RL policy safety post-training. We show that our approach improves and helps to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-17 Dennis Gross , Helge Spieker

Reinforcement learning algorithms typically necessitate extensive exploration of the state space to find optimal policies. However, in safety-critical applications, the risks associated with such exploration can lead to catastrophic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-28 Kaustubh Mani , Vincent Mai , Charlie Gauthier , Annie Chen , Samer Nashed , Liam Paull

In standard reinforcement learning (RL), a learning agent seeks to optimize the overall reward. However, many key aspects of a desired behavior are more naturally expressed as constraints. For instance, the designer may want to limit the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-29 Sobhan Miryoosefi , Kianté Brantley , Hal Daumé , Miroslav Dudik , Robert Schapire

While reinforcement learning algorithms provide automated acquisition of optimal policies, practical application of such methods requires a number of design decisions, such as manually designing reward functions that not only define the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-29 Tim G. J. Rudner , Vitchyr H. Pong , Rowan McAllister , Yarin Gal , Sergey Levine

We study a security threat to reinforcement learning where an attacker poisons the learning environment to force the agent into executing a target policy chosen by the attacker. As a victim, we consider RL agents whose objective is to find…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-24 Amin Rakhsha , Goran Radanovic , Rati Devidze , Xiaojin Zhu , Adish Singla

Deep reinforcement learning algorithms can learn complex behavioral skills, but real-world application of these methods requires a large amount of experience to be collected by the agent. In practical settings, such as robotics, this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-11-21 Benjamin Eysenbach , Shixiang Gu , Julian Ibarz , Sergey Levine

Learning-based approaches, such as reinforcement and imitation learning are gaining popularity in decision-making for autonomous driving. However, learned policies often fail to generalize and cannot handle novel situations well. Asking and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-13 Patrick Hart , Alois Knoll

We study defense strategies against reward poisoning attacks in reinforcement learning. As a threat model, we consider attacks that minimally alter rewards to make the attacker's target policy uniquely optimal under the poisoned rewards,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-22 Kiarash Banihashem , Adish Singla , Goran Radanovic

The increasing adoption of Reinforcement Learning in safety-critical systems domains such as autonomous vehicles, health, and aviation raises the need for ensuring their safety. Existing safety mechanisms such as adversarial training,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-11 Paulina Stevia Nouwou Mindom , Amin Nikanjam , Foutse Khomh , John Mullins

Reinforcement learning algorithms, just like any other Machine learning algorithm pose a serious threat from adversaries. The adversaries can manipulate the learning algorithm resulting in non-optimal policies. In this paper, we analyze the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-12 Aqeel Anwar , Arijit Raychowdhury

Algorithmic recommendations and decisions have become ubiquitous in today's society. Many of these data-driven policies, especially in the realm of public policy, are based on known, deterministic rules to ensure their transparency and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-04-02 Eli Ben-Michael , D. James Greiner , Kosuke Imai , Zhichao Jiang

Several recent works have been dedicated to unsupervised reinforcement learning in a single environment, in which a policy is first pre-trained with unsupervised interactions, and then fine-tuned towards the optimal policy for several…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-17 Mirco Mutti , Mattia Mancassola , Marcello Restelli

In the field of explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI), sequential counterfactual (SCF) examples are often used to alter the decision of a trained classifier by implementing a sequence of modifications to the input instance. Although…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-02 E. Panagiotou , E. Ntoutsi

An important problem in reinforcement learning is designing agents that learn to solve tasks safely in an environment. A common solution is for a human expert to define either a penalty in the reward function or a cost to be minimised when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-02 Geraud Nangue Tasse , Tamlin Love , Mark Nemecek , Steven James , Benjamin Rosman

We study a security threat to batch reinforcement learning and control where the attacker aims to poison the learned policy. The victim is a reinforcement learner / controller which first estimates the dynamics and the rewards from a batch…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-01 Yuzhe Ma , Xuezhou Zhang , Wen Sun , Xiaojin Zhu

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