Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Politowicz, Alexander, Mazumder, Sahisnu, Liu, Bing
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.19414
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866911893786984448
author Politowicz, Alexander
Mazumder, Sahisnu
Liu, Bing
author_facet Politowicz, Alexander
Mazumder, Sahisnu
Liu, Bing
contents Designing Reinforcement Learning (RL) solutions for real-life problems remains a significant challenge. A major area of concern is safety. "Shielding" is a popular technique to enforce safety in RL by turning user-defined safety specifications into safe agent behavior. However, these methods either suffer from extreme learning delays, demand extensive human effort in designing models and safe domains in the problem, or require pre-computation. In this paper, we propose a new permissibility-based framework to deal with safety and shield construction. Permissibility was originally designed for eliminating (non-permissible) actions that will not lead to an optimal solution to improve RL training efficiency. This paper shows that safety can be naturally incorporated into this framework, i.e. extending permissibility to include safety, and thereby we can achieve both safety and improved efficiency. Experimental evaluation using three standard RL applications shows the effectiveness of the approach.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_19414
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Safety through Permissibility: Shield Construction for Fast and Safe Reinforcement Learning
Politowicz, Alexander
Mazumder, Sahisnu
Liu, Bing
Machine Learning
Designing Reinforcement Learning (RL) solutions for real-life problems remains a significant challenge. A major area of concern is safety. "Shielding" is a popular technique to enforce safety in RL by turning user-defined safety specifications into safe agent behavior. However, these methods either suffer from extreme learning delays, demand extensive human effort in designing models and safe domains in the problem, or require pre-computation. In this paper, we propose a new permissibility-based framework to deal with safety and shield construction. Permissibility was originally designed for eliminating (non-permissible) actions that will not lead to an optimal solution to improve RL training efficiency. This paper shows that safety can be naturally incorporated into this framework, i.e. extending permissibility to include safety, and thereby we can achieve both safety and improved efficiency. Experimental evaluation using three standard RL applications shows the effectiveness of the approach.
title Safety through Permissibility: Shield Construction for Fast and Safe Reinforcement Learning
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.19414