{"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/safe-model-based-reinforcement-learning-using","title":"Safe Reinforcement Learning Using Robust Control Barrier Functions","arxiv_id":"2110.05415","date":"2021-10-11","proceeding":null,"authors":["Yousef Emam","Gennaro Notomista","Paul Glotfelter","Zsolt Kira","Magnus Egerstedt"],"abstract":"Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been shown to be effective in many scenarios. However, it typically requires the exploration of a sufficiently large number of state-action pairs, some of which may be unsafe. Consequently, its application to safety-critical systems remains a challenge. An increasingly common approach to address safety involves the addition of a safety layer that projects the RL actions onto a safe set of actions. In turn, a difficulty for such frameworks is how to effectively couple RL with the safety layer to improve the learning performance. In this paper, we frame safety as a differentiable robust-control-barrier-function layer in a model-based RL framework. Moreover, we also propose an approach to modularly learn the underlying reward-driven task, independent of safety constraints. We demonstrate that this approach both ensures safety and effectively guides exploration during training in a range of experiments, including zero-shot transfer when the reward is learned in a modular way.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.05415v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2110.05415v2.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":"safe-model-based-reinforcement-learning-using","repo_url":"https://github.com/yemam3/mod-rl-rcbf","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"model-based-reinforcement-learning","task_name":"Model-based Reinforcement Learning"},{"task_slug":"reinforcement-learning","task_name":"Reinforcement Learning"},{"task_slug":"reinforcement-learning-1","task_name":"Reinforcement Learning (RL)"},{"task_slug":"safe-reinforcement-learning","task_name":"Safe Reinforcement Learning"},{"task_slug":"reinforcement-learning-2","task_name":"reinforcement-learning"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2110.05415","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}