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).
By Edwin Hamel-De le Court, Thom Badings, Alessandro Abate, Francesco Belardinelli, Francesco Fabiano
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.
By Sabine Rieder, Stefan Pranger, Debraj Chakraborty, Jan K\v{r}et\'insk\'y, Bettina K\"onighofer
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.
By William Scarbro, Ravi Mangal
arXiv:2606. 03804v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safe exploration is a key challenge in Reinforcement Learning (RL) that aims to prevent agents from making harmful decisions while exploring their environment.
By Stefan Pranger, Bettina K\"onighofer
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.
By Manuel Wendl, Yarden As, Manish Prajapat, Anton Pollak, Stelian Coros, Andreas Krause
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.
By Donggeon David Oh, Duy P. Nguyen, Haimin Hu, Jaime Fern\'andez Fisac