{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/reinforcement-learning-with-adaptive-control","title":"Reinforcement Learning with Adaptive Regularization for Safe Control of Critical Systems","arxiv_id":"2404.15199","date":"2024-04-23","proceeding":null,"authors":["Haozhe Tian","Homayoun Hamedmoghadam","Robert Shorten","Pietro Ferraro"],"abstract":"Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a powerful method for controlling dynamic systems, but its learning mechanism can lead to unpredictable actions that undermine the safety of critical systems. Here, we propose RL with Adaptive Regularization (RL-AR), an algorithm that enables safe RL exploration by combining the RL policy with a policy regularizer that hard-codes the safety constraints. RL-AR performs policy combination via a \"focus module,\" which determines the appropriate combination depending on the state--relying more on the safe policy regularizer for less-exploited states while allowing unbiased convergence for well-exploited states. In a series of critical control applications, we demonstrate that RL-AR not only ensures safety during training but also achieves a return competitive with the standards of model-free RL that disregards safety.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.15199v3","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2404.15199v3.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"reinforcement-learning-with-adaptive-control","repo_url":"https://github.com/haozhetian/rl-ar","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"reinforcement-learning-1","task_name":"Reinforcement Learning (RL)"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"focus","method_name":"Focus"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}