Safety is still one of the major research challenges in reinforcement learning (RL). In this paper, we address the problem of how to avoid safety violations of RL agents during exploration in probabilistic and partially unknown environments. Our approach combines automata learning for Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) and shield synthesis in an iterative approach. Initially, the MDP representing the environment is unknown. The agent starts exploring the environment and collects traces. From the collected traces, we passively learn MDPs that abstractly represent the safety-relevant aspects of the environment. Given a learned MDP and a safety specification, we construct a shield. For each state-action pair within a learned MDP, the shield computes exact probabilities on how likely it is that executing the action results in violating the specification from the current state within the next $k$ steps. After the shield is constructed, the shield is used during runtime and blocks any actions that induce a too large risk from the agent. The shielded agent continues to explore the environment and collects new data on the environment. Iteratively, we use the collected data to learn new MDPs with higher accuracy, resulting in turn in shields able to prevent more safety violations. We implemented our approach and present a detailed case study of a Q-learning agent exploring slippery Gridworlds. In our experiments, we show that as the agent explores more and more of the environment during training, the improved learned models lead to shields that are able to prevent many safety violations.

在实际应用中，尽管这种知识对于确定反应性控制系统与环境的精确相互作用很重要，但我们很少可以完全观察到系统的环境。因此，我们提出了一种在部分可观察到的环境中进行加固学习方法（RL）。在假设环境的行为就像是可观察到的马尔可夫决策过程，但我们对其结构或过渡概率不了解。我们的方法将Q学习与IOALERGIA结合在一起，这是一种学习马尔可夫决策过程（MDP）的方法。通过从RL代理的发作中学习环境的MDP模型，我们可以在不明确的部分可观察到的域中启用RL，而没有明确的记忆，以跟踪以前的相互作用，以处理由部分可观察性引起的歧义。相反，我们通过模拟学习环境模型上的新体验以跟踪探索状态，以抽象环境状态的形式提供其他观察结果。在我们的评估中，我们报告了方法的有效性及其有希望的性能，与六种具有复发性神经网络和固定记忆的最先进的深度RL技术相比。