Reinforcement learning (RL) enables the synthesis of control policies directly from data, making it highly appealing for complex cyber-physical systems (CPSs) and robotics. A persistent challenge, however, is ensuring strict, hard safety constraints during the active learning phase.
arXiv:2607. 07252v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) enables the synthesis of control policies directly from data, making it highly appealing for complex cyber-physical systems (CPSs) and robotics.
By Georg Sch\"afer, Jakob Rehrl, Stefan Huber, Simon Hirlaender
Reinforcement Learning has revolutionized the landscape of robotic research, allowing robust learning of complex robotic skills in simulation. However, real-world deployment in open-ended environments requires strong safety guarantees to prevent dangerous or harmful behaviors.
arXiv:2607. 12784v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement Learning has revolutionized the landscape of robotic research, allowing robust learning of complex robotic skills in simulation.
By Paolo Magliano, Puze Liu, Jan Peters, Davide Tateo, Raffaello Camoriano
arXiv:2606. 14415v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safe reinforcement learning (Safe RL) aims to maximize expected return while satisfying safety constraints, typically modeled as Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs).
By Ayoub Belouadah, Sylvain Kubler, Yves Le Traon
The paper introduces new evaluation metrics for safe reinforcement learning that go beyond average safety guarantees by examining how often and how severely safety bounds are violated, consistency across tasks and bounds, and the relationship between training-time and final policy behavior. It also proposes a safety tier system for categorizing algorithms and presents empirical safety evaluations on multiple navigation tasks. The authors recommend reporting aggregate metrics, distributional data, and task‑specific results together, and provide an open‑source suite, SafeRLEval, to facilitate reliable safety assessment.
By Lindsay Spoor, Aske Plaat, Thomas Moerland
arXiv:2607. 15457v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study robust peak-cost constrained reinforcement learning (RP-CRL), where the objective is to maximize expected reward while controlling the maximum cost encountered along a trajectory.
By Shilpa Mukhopadhyay, Sourav Ganguly, Santosh Mohan Rajkumar, Honghao Wei, Debdipta Goswami, Arnob Ghosh
arXiv:2604. 12474v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In many robotic tasks, agents must traverse a sequence of spatial regions to complete a mission.
By Lidor Erez, Shahaf S. Shperberg, Ayal Taitler
The paper introduces Exchange Policy Optimization (EPO), a framework for semi‑infinite safe reinforcement learning that handles infinitely many constraints by iteratively solving finite subproblems. EPO expands or deletes constraints based on tolerance violations and Lagrange multipliers, maintaining computational tractability while converging to an optimal policy with bounded safety violations. The authors prove finite convergence, provide iteration bounds, and quantify the suboptimality gap under mild assumptions.
By Jiaming Zhang, Yujie Yang, Haoning Wang, Liping Zhang, Shengbo Eben Li
The paper introduces a new approach to learning chance-constrained Markov decision processes (CCMDPs) using a Bellman distributional certificate. It provides both model-based and model-free algorithms with theoretical guarantees, including matching upper and lower bounds for tabular discounted CCMDPs with bounded successor support. Numerical experiments on synthetic CCMDPs and an IEEE 14-bus energy storage benchmark demonstrate the safety and effectiveness of the proposed methods.
By Chenbei Lu, Hongyu Yi
arXiv:2606. 14536v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safe reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn policies that optimize rewards while satisfying constraints.
By Kai S. Yun, Zeyang Li, Navid Azizan
arXiv:2606. 20376v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Safety is a core concern for deploying reinforcement learning (RL) agents in real-world domains such as robotics and autonomous driving.
By Tristan Tomilin, Mourad Boustani, Mickey Beurskens, Thiago D. Sim\~ao