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arXiv research

A locally-built, LLM-digested index of recent arXiv papers in quant finance, geometry/topology, and statistical ML — keyword search served straight from SQLite on this machine.

168,657 papers · 148 categories

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275380106 · Jun 202019922001200920172026
48 results for safe RL

Revel tackles safe exploration in RL with verified symbolic policies.

problem Computational infeasibility of verifying neural networks in RL learning loops.
method Two policy classes: neurosymbolic with approximate gradients and symbolic policies for efficient verification. Mirror descent over policies to safely update and project policies.
result Revel discovers policies that outperform prior approaches to verified exploration.

Safe exploration in RF-RL doesn't increase sample complexity.

problem Achieving optimal policies with safety constraints in reward-free RL.
method Proposed SWEET framework for tabular and low-rank MDP settings, leveraging truncated value functions.
result Sample complexities match or outperform constraint-free counterparts, proving safety constraints have little impact.

The paper tackles safe exploration in RL by a conservative safety critic.

problem Safe exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) when partially trained policies are deployed.
method Learning a conservative safety estimate through a critic, provably bounding catastrophic failures.
result The approach provably converges to competitive task performance with significantly lower catastrophic failure rates.

The paper tackles safe reinforcement learning with convex regularization.

problem Safe reinforcement learning in complex, high-dimensional settings with safety constraints.
method Doubly-regularized RL framework combining reward and parameter regularization, formulated as a convex regularized objective with parametrized policies on an infinite-dimensional statistical manifold.
result Exponential convergence guarantees under sufficient regularization, robust theoretical insights and guarantees for safe RL.

A novel approach for safe offline RL using latent safety constraints.

problem Balancing safety constraints and reward maximization in offline RL.
method Conditional Variational Autoencoders for latent safety modeling, Constrained Reward-Return Maximization.
result Our approach maintains safety compliance while optimizing rewards, outperforming existing methods.

Safe offline RL for chemical reactors using input convex neural networks.

problem Safe control of exothermic polymerization reactors using historical data.
method Gymnasium-compatible simulation, behaviour cloning, implicit Q-learning, input convex neural networks (PICNNs).
result Offline RL with convex action correction outperforms traditional control approaches.

This paper proposes a method to safely adjust exploration in RL to satisfy constraints.

problem Unsafe exploration in reinforcement learning violates constraints on controlled object states.
method Automatic adjustment of exploration inputs and variance-covariance matrix for safety.
result The method guarantees satisfaction of joint chance constraints with specified probability.

This paper presents the concept of an adaptive safe padding that forces Reinforcement Learning (RL) to synthesise optimal control policies while ensuring safety during the learning process. Policies are synthesised to satisfy a goal, expressed as a temporal logic formula, with maximal probability. Enforcing the RL agen…

2020-02-26abs ↗pdf ↗

Batch Reinforcement Learning (Batch RL) consists in training a policy using trajectories collected with another policy, called the behavioural policy. Safe policy improvement (SPI) provides guarantees with high probability that the trained policy performs better than the behavioural policy, also called baseline in this…

2019-07-11abs ↗pdf ↗

ESRL uses uncertainty quantification to learn safe, optimal policies in offline RL.

problem Challenges in interpreting and measuring uncertainty of learned policies in offline RL.
method Expert-Supervised Reinforcement Learning (ESRL) framework that uses hypothesis testing and posterior distributions.
result The framework can learn safe and optimal policies with theoretical guarantees and independent sample efficiency.

Q-learning is one of the most popular methods in Reinforcement Learning (RL). Transfer Learning aims to utilize the learned knowledge from source tasks to help new tasks to improve the sample complexity of the new tasks. Considering that data collection in RL is both more time and cost consuming and Q-learning converge…

2018-09-21abs ↗pdf ↗

This paper considers Safe Policy Improvement (SPI) in Batch Reinforcement Learning (Batch RL): from a fixed dataset and without direct access to the true environment, train a policy that is guaranteed to perform at least as well as the baseline policy used to collect the data. Our approach, called SPI with Baseline Boo…

2017-12-19abs ↗pdf ↗

In many real-world reinforcement learning (RL) problems, besides optimizing the main objective function, an agent must concurrently avoid violating a number of constraints. In particular, besides optimizing performance it is crucial to guarantee the safety of an agent during training as well as deployment (e.g. a robot…

2018-05-20abs ↗pdf ↗

Safe exploration method for RL under disturbance ensures safety with probabilistic guarantees.

problem Safe reinforcement learning in real environments with disturbance.
method Uses partial prior knowledge and conservative inputs to ensure state constraint satisfaction.
result Guaranteed safety with pre-specified probability in the presence of stochastic disturbance.

Safe RL in linear systems achieves T\sqrt{T}-regret.

problem Efficiently learning in safety-constrained online reinforcement learning.
method Study of linear quadratic regulator with safety constraints.
result First safe algorithm with ildeOT(T) ilde{O}_T(\sqrt{T})-regret.

The operational space of an autonomous vehicle (AV) can be diverse and vary significantly. This may lead to a scenario that was not postulated in the design phase. Due to this, formulating a rule based decision maker for selecting maneuvers may not be ideal. Similarly, it may not be effective to design an a-priori cost…

2019-03-29abs ↗pdf ↗

Reward-poisoning attacks can force RL agents to learn bad policies, and we categorize and quantify their feasibility.

problem Reward-poisoning attacks can manipulate RL agents to learn undesirable policies.
method Categorize attacks by infinity-norm constraint, provide thresholds for feasibility, and develop adaptive attack strategies.
result Adaptive reward-poisoning attacks can achieve the nefarious policy in polynomial steps, while non-adaptive attacks require exponential steps.

A new method improves actor-critic RL by integrating HMC, enhancing policy distribution and exploration.

problem Actor-critic RL yields suboptimal policies due to amortization gap and insufficient exploration.
method Integrating Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) into the actor-critic RL framework.
result Improves policy distribution and exploration, leading to better policy estimates and higher returns.

CQL (ReDS) learns from varied driving behaviors, improving offline RL performance.

problem Learning from datasets with non-uniform variability in behavior policies.
method Reweighting the data distribution to allow per-state flexibility in following the behavior policy.
result CQL (ReDS) improves performance in various offline RL tasks.

SECRM-2D improves RL-based autonomous driving with safety guarantees.

problem Safety and efficiency trade-offs in RL-based autonomous driving.
method RL-based controller with safety constraints for efficient and comfortable driving.
result SECRM-2D avoids crashes and improves efficiency and comfort compared to baselines.

Survey of RL methods for control systems with time delays.

problem Time delays in cyber-physical systems degrade RL performance and stability.
method Categorizes and analyzes five major families of RL methods for time delays.
result Identifies key trade-offs and practical guidelines for selecting RL methods.

VaR-CPO optimizes VaR-constrained RL problems with conservative policy updates.

problem Optimizing VaR-constrained reinforcement learning problems.
method Combines Cantelli's inequality and trust-region framework for efficient and conservative optimization.
result Achieves zero constraint violations during training in feasible environments.

We study the problem of off-policy value evaluation in reinforcement learning (RL), where one aims to estimate the value of a new policy based on data collected by a different policy. This problem is often a critical step when applying RL in real-world problems. Despite its importance, existing general methods either h…

2015-11-11abs ↗pdf ↗

Improved RL policies from offline data with relaxed BC constraints.

problem Overestimation bias in offline RL due to lack of interaction with environment.
method Introducing a policy constraint via behavioural cloning (BC) and adjusting the balance between RL and BC.
result Refined policies outperform baseline and match/exceed complex alternatives.

In order to satisfy safety conditions, an agent may be constrained from acting freely. A safe controller can be designed a priori if an environment is well understood, but not when learning is employed. In particular, reinforcement learned (RL) controllers require exploration, which can be hazardous in safety critical …

2019-10-02abs ↗pdf ↗

RRPI improves offline RL by optimizing policies against worst-case dynamics.

problem Offline RL's performance degrades under distribution shift and transition uncertainty.
method Formulates offline RL as robust policy optimization, treating transition kernel as decision variable.
result RRPI achieves strong average performance on D4RL benchmarks, outperforming recent baselines.

A new policy switching technique improves offline RL performance.

problem Challenges in adapting off-policy algorithms to different datasets and tasks.
method Combines off-policy RL and BC, using epistemic uncertainty for policy switching.
result Outperforms individual algorithms and state-of-the-art methods on benchmarks.

Dynamic Vocabulary Pruning stabilizes LLM training by removing low-probability tokens.

problem Training Large Language Models (LLMs) with Reinforcement Learning (RL) causes numerical divergence between inference and training.
method Dynamic Vocabulary Pruning (DVP) constrains the RL objective to a safe vocabulary that excludes low-probability tokens.
result DVP stabilizes training by reducing systematic bias introduced by the extreme tail of the token distribution.

UVU simplifies value uncertainty quantification in RL.

problem Estimating epistemic uncertainty in value functions for reinforcement learning.
method UVU uses squared prediction errors between an online learner and a fixed, randomly initialized target network, incorporating policy-conditional value uncertainty.
result UVU achieves equal performance to large ensembles on challenging offline RL settings, with computational savings.