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Related papers: Counterfactually Safe Reinforcement Learning

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We develop a learning principle and an efficient algorithm for batch learning from logged bandit feedback. This learning setting is ubiquitous in online systems (e.g., ad placement, web search, recommendation), where an algorithm makes a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-05-22 Adith Swaminathan , Thorsten Joachims

Machine Learning models are increasingly used in businesses to detect faults and anomalies in complex systems. In this work, we take this approach a step further: beyond merely detecting anomalies, we aim to identify the optimal control…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-07-15 Emilio Carrizosa , Martina Fischetti , Roshell Haaker , Juan Miguel Morales

This article introduces an imitation learning method for learning maximum entropy policies that comply with constraints demonstrated by expert trajectories executing a task. The formulation of the method takes advantage of results…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-10 George Papadopoulos , George A. Vouros

As machine learning is increasingly used to inform consequential decision-making (e.g., pre-trial bail and loan approval), it becomes important to explain how the system arrived at its decision, and also suggest actions to achieve a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-09 Amir-Hossein Karimi , Bernhard Schölkopf , Isabel Valera

For AI systems to be useful to humans, they must understand and act in accordance with our values and preferences. Since specifying preferences is a hard task, inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) aims to develop methods that allow for…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Karim Abdel Sadek , Mark Bedaywi , Rhys Gould , Stuart Russell

Meta-learning algorithms use past experience to learn to quickly solve new tasks. In the context of reinforcement learning, meta-learning algorithms acquire reinforcement learning procedures to solve new problems more efficiently by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-01 Abhishek Gupta , Benjamin Eysenbach , Chelsea Finn , Sergey Levine

In reinforcement learning, an agent interacts sequentially with an environment to maximize a reward, receiving only partial, probabilistic feedback. This creates a fundamental exploration-exploitation trade-off: the agent must explore to…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2026-03-27 Josep Lumbreras , Ruo Cheng Huang , Yanglin Hu , Marco Fanizza , Mile Gu

For all its successes, Reinforcement Learning (RL) still struggles to deliver formal guarantees on the closed-loop behavior of the learned policy. Among other things, guaranteeing the safety of RL with respect to safety-critical systems is…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-04-03 Sebastien Gros , Mario Zanon , Alberto Bemporad

Recent advances in deep reinforcement learning have demonstrated the capability of learning complex control policies from many types of environments. When learning policies for safety-critical applications, it is essential to be sensitive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-12 Yichuan Charlie Tang , Jian Zhang , Ruslan Salakhutdinov

In this paper, we use concepts from supervisory control theory of discrete event systems to propose a method to learn optimal control policies for a finite-state Markov Decision Process (MDP) in which (only) certain sequences of actions are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-04 Arun Raman , Keerthan Shagrithaya , Shalabh Bhatnagar

Reinforcement learning can greatly benefit from the use of options as a way of encoding recurring behaviours and to foster exploration. An important open problem is how can an agent autonomously learn useful options when solving particular…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-07 Manuel Del Verme , Bruno Castro da Silva , Gianluca Baldassarre

In reinforcement learning, classic on-policy evaluation methods often suffer from high variance and require massive online data to attain the desired accuracy. Previous studies attempt to reduce evaluation variance by searching for or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-21 Claire Chen , Shuze Daniel Liu , Shangtong Zhang

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

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

In a sequential decision-making problem, off-policy evaluation estimates the expected cumulative reward of a target policy using logged trajectory data generated from a different behavior policy, without execution of the target policy.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-04 Jie Wang , Rui Gao , Hongyuan Zha

Counterfactuals operationalised through algorithmic recourse have become a powerful tool to make artificial intelligence systems explainable. Conceptually, given an individual classified as y -- the factual -- we seek actions such that…

To collaborate well with robots, we must be able to understand their decision making. Humans naturally infer other agents' beliefs and desires by reasoning about their observable behavior in a way that resembles inverse reinforcement…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-08-05 Michael S. Lee , Henny Admoni , Reid Simmons

A long-term goal of reinforcement learning is to design agents that can autonomously interact and learn in the world. A critical challenge to such autonomy is the presence of irreversible states which require external assistance to recover…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-20 Annie Xie , Fahim Tajwar , Archit Sharma , Chelsea Finn

Solving tasks in Reinforcement Learning is no easy feat. As the goal of the agent is to maximize the accumulated reward, it often learns to exploit loopholes and misspecifications in the reward signal resulting in unwanted behavior. While…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-12-27 Chen Tessler , Daniel J. Mankowitz , Shie Mannor

Safe exploration aims at addressing the limitations of Reinforcement Learning (RL) in safety-critical scenarios, where failures during trial-and-error learning may incur high costs. Several methods exist to incorporate external knowledge or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-13 Xiaotong Ji , Antonio Filieri