arXiv AI
Aug 21
Adaptive Probabilistic Shielding by Learning MDPs for Safe Reinforcement Learning
arXiv:2608. 19836v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Probabilistic shielding is a technique for safe reinforcement learning (RL).
Robust Shielding for Safe Reinforcement Learning
arXiv:2606. 00270v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Shielding is an effective approach to formally guarantee the safety of reinforcement learning agents in Markov decision processes (MDPs).
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arXiv AI
Aug 20
Interval POMDP Shielding for Imperfect-Perception Agents
The paper introduces Interval POMDP Shielding for agents with imperfect perception, aiming to prevent unsafe actions when sensor readings may be misclassified. By estimating perception uncertainty from finite labeled data, the authors construct confidence intervals and model the system as a finite Interval Partially Observable Markov Decision Process. They propose an algorithm that computes a conservative belief set, enabling a runtime shield that guarantees, with high probability, that any action allowed by the shield meets a specified safety lower bound. Experiments on four case studies demonstrate that this shielding approach outperforms state‑of‑the‑art baselines in safety.
arXiv AI
Aug 26
Adaptive GR(1) Specification Repair for Liveness-Preserving Shielding in Reinforcement Learning
arXiv:2511.02605v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Shielding is widely used to enforce safety in reinforcement learning (RL), ensuring that an agent's actions remain compliant with formal specificat...
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 21
Provably Optimal Reinforcement Learning under Safety Filtering
The paper proves that using a permissive safety filter in reinforcement learning does not compromise asymptotic performance. By formalizing safety through a safety‑critical Markov decision process and a filtered MDP, the authors show that optimal policies in the filtered MDP achieve the same return as the best safe policy in the original setting. Experiments on Safety Gymnasium confirm zero violations during training and performance that matches or exceeds unfiltered baselines.
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 4
Explainably Safe Reinforcement Learning
arXiv:2606. 04634v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Trust in a decision-making system requires both safety guarantees and the ability to interpret and understand its behavior.
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 15
Contract-Based Compositional Shielding for Safe Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
arXiv:2606. 14130v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safe coordination problems surface in multi-agent reinforcement learning when global safety cannot be enforced by any agent unilaterally: the admissibility of one agent's action may depend on the dynamics of other agents.
arXiv Machine Learning
5d ago
Learning Chance-Constrained MDPs with Bellman Distributional Certificates
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.
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 4
Near-Optimal Reinforcement Learning for Constrained Recurrence Objectives
arXiv:2511. 19849v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recurrence objectives, where a target region must be visited infinitely often, are a fundamental class of specifications for Markov decision processes (MDPs) and form the core of $\omega$-regular and linear temporal logic (LTL) objectives.
arXiv Machine Learning
5d ago
Robust Successor Features
The paper introduces robust successor features, a method that extends the successor representation to handle uncertainty in both reward functions and transition kernels within linear Markov Decision Processes. It provides a theoretical bound on Generalized Policy Improvement that quantifies performance loss due to mismatched dynamics, and demonstrates the approach on grid-based benchmarks against prior methods that consider only reward or transition differences.
arXiv AI
Sep 15
Evaluation Metrics for Safe Reinforcement Learning
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.
arXiv AI
Jun 16
Safe Exploration via Policy Priors
arXiv:2601. 19612v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Safe exploration is a key requirement for reinforcement learning (RL) agents to learn and adapt online, beyond controlled (e.
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 15
Safe Meta-Reinforcement Learning via Information Space Reachability
arXiv:2609.15915v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Meta-reinforcement learning (meta-RL) enables agents to adapt to unseen tasks with limited experience. Despite its promise, the application of meta-RL...