Kenta Hoshino

Kazumi Kasaura, Shuwa Miura, Tadashi Kozuno et al.

This study presents a benchmark for evaluating action-constrained reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. In action-constrained RL, each action taken by the learning system must comply with certain constraints. These constraints are crucial for ensuring the feasibility and safety of actions in real-world systems. We evaluate existing algorithms and their novel variants across multiple robotics control environments, encompassing multiple action constraint types. Our evaluation provides the first in-depth perspective of the field, revealing surprising insights, including the effectiveness of a straightforward baseline approach. The benchmark problems and associated code utilized in our experiments are made available online at github.com/omron-sinicx/action-constrained-RL-benchmark for further research and development.

Toshinori Kitamura, Tadashi Kozuno, Wataru Kumagai et al.

Designing a safe policy for uncertain environments is crucial in real-world control systems. However, this challenge remains inadequately addressed within the Markov decision process (MDP) framework. This paper presents the first algorithm guaranteed to identify a near-optimal policy in a robust constrained MDP (RCMDP), where an optimal policy minimizes cumulative cost while satisfying constraints in the worst-case scenario across a set of environments. We first prove that the conventional policy gradient approach to the Lagrangian max-min formulation can become trapped in suboptimal solutions. This occurs when its inner minimization encounters a sum of conflicting gradients from the objective and constraint functions. To address this, we leverage the epigraph form of the RCMDP problem, which resolves the conflict by selecting a single gradient from either the objective or the constraints. Building on the epigraph form, we propose a bisection search algorithm with a policy gradient subroutine and prove that it identifies an $\varepsilon$-optimal policy in an RCMDP with $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\varepsilon^{-4})$ robust policy evaluations.

Too Matsuo, Yuki Nishimura, Kenta Hoshino et al.

A marine vessel is a nonlinear system subject to irregular disturbances such as wind and waves, which cause tracking errors between the nominal and actual trajectories. In this study, a nonlinear vessel maneuvering model that includes a tracking controller is formulated and then controlled using a linear approximation around the nominal trajectory. The resulting stochastic linearized system is analyzed using a stochastic zeroing control barrier function (ZCBF). A stochastic safety compensator is designed to ensure probabilistic safety, and its effectiveness is verified through numerical simulations.

Toshinori Kitamura, Arnob Ghosh, Tadashi Kozuno et al.

We study the reinforcement learning (RL) problem in a constrained Markov decision process (CMDP), where an agent explores the environment to maximize the expected cumulative reward while satisfying a single constraint on the expected total utility value in every episode. While this problem is well understood in the tabular setting, theoretical results for function approximation remain scarce. This paper closes the gap by proposing an RL algorithm for linear CMDPs that achieves $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\sqrt{K})$ regret with an episode-wise zero-violation guarantee. Furthermore, our method is computationally efficient, scaling polynomially with problem-dependent parameters while remaining independent of the state space size. Our results significantly improve upon recent linear CMDP algorithms, which either violate the constraint or incur exponential computational costs.