{"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/shielded-reinforcement-learning-for-hybrid","title":"Shielded Reinforcement Learning for Hybrid Systems","arxiv_id":"2308.14424","date":"2023-08-28","proceeding":null,"authors":["Asger Horn Brorholt","Peter Gjøl Jensen","Kim Guldstrand Larsen","Florian Lorber","Christian Schilling"],"abstract":"Safe and optimal controller synthesis for switched-controlled hybrid systems, which combine differential equations and discrete changes of the system's state, is known to be intricately hard. Reinforcement learning has been leveraged to construct near-optimal controllers, but their behavior is not guaranteed to be safe, even when it is encouraged by reward engineering. One way of imposing safety to a learned controller is to use a shield, which is correct by design. However, obtaining a shield for non-linear and hybrid environments is itself intractable. In this paper, we propose the construction of a shield using the so-called barbaric method, where an approximate finite representation of an underlying partition-based two-player safety game is extracted via systematically picked samples of the true transition function. While hard safety guarantees are out of reach, we experimentally demonstrate strong statistical safety guarantees with a prototype implementation and UPPAAL STRATEGO. Furthermore, we study the impact of the synthesized shield when applied as either a pre-shield (applied before learning a controller) or a post-shield (only applied after learning a controller). We experimentally demonstrate superiority of the pre-shielding approach. We apply our technique on a range of case studies, including two industrial examples, and further study post-optimization of the post-shielding approach.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.14424v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2308.14424v1.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":"shielded-reinforcement-learning-for-hybrid","repo_url":"https://github.com/asgerhb/shielded-learning-for-hybrid-systems","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null},{"paper_slug":"shielded-reinforcement-learning-for-hybrid","repo_url":"https://github.com/asgerhb/state-space-transformation-shielding","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"reinforcement-learning","task_name":"Reinforcement Learning"},{"task_slug":"reinforcement-learning-2","task_name":"reinforcement-learning"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}