English

Reinforcement Learning with $\omega$-Regular Objectives and Constraints

Artificial Intelligence 2025-11-26 v1 Machine Learning

Abstract

Reinforcement learning (RL) commonly relies on scalar rewards with limited ability to express temporal, conditional, or safety-critical goals, and can lead to reward hacking. Temporal logic expressible via the more general class of ω\omega-regular objectives addresses this by precisely specifying rich behavioural properties. Even still, measuring performance by a single scalar (be it reward or satisfaction probability) masks safety-performance trade-offs that arise in settings with a tolerable level of risk. We address both limitations simultaneously by combining ω\omega-regular objectives with explicit constraints, allowing safety requirements and optimisation targets to be treated separately. We develop a model-based RL algorithm based on linear programming, which in the limit produces a policy maximising the probability of satisfying an ω\omega-regular objective while also adhering to ω\omega-regular constraints within specified thresholds. Furthermore, we establish a translation to constrained limit-average problems with optimality-preserving guarantees.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2511.19849,
  title  = {Reinforcement Learning with $\omega$-Regular Objectives and Constraints},
  author = {Dominik Wagner and Leon Witzman and Luke Ong},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.19849},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T07:53:26.888Z