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Hierarchical Framework for Interpretable and Probabilistic Model-Based Safe Reinforcement Learning

28 Oct 2023arXiv:2310.18811archive 2025-07-28

Ammar N. Abbas, Georgios C. Chasparis, John D. Kelleher

The difficulty of identifying the physical model of complex systems has led to exploring methods that do not rely on such complex modeling of the systems. Deep reinforcement learning has been the pioneer for solving this problem without the need for relying on the physical model of complex systems by just interacting with it. However, it uses a black-box learning approach that makes it difficult to be applied within real-world and safety-critical systems without providing explanations of the actions derived by the model. Furthermore, an open research question in deep reinforcement learning is how to focus the policy learning of critical decisions within a sparse domain. This paper proposes a novel approach for the use of deep reinforcement learning in safety-critical systems. It combines the advantages of probabilistic modeling and reinforcement learning with the added benefits of interpretability and works in collaboration and synchronization with conventional decision-making strategies. The BC-SRLA is activated in specific situations which are identified autonomously through the fused information of probabilistic model and reinforcement learning, such as abnormal conditions or when the system is near-to-failure. Further, it is initialized with a baseline policy using policy cloning to allow minimum interactions with the environment to address the challenges associated with using RL in safety-critical industries. The effectiveness of the BC-SRLA is demonstrated through a case study in maintenance applied to turbofan engines, where it shows superior performance to the prior art and other baselines.

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Code

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Tasks

Decision MakingDeep Reinforcement LearningReinforcement LearningSafe Reinforcement Learningreinforcement-learning

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Decision Making NASA C-MAPSS SRLA Average Remaining Cycles 6.4 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report

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Methods

AdamClipped Double Q-learningDense ConnectionsExperience ReplayFocusReLUTD3Target Policy Smoothing

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