# Trustworthy Reinforcement Learning Against Intrinsic Vulnerabilities: Robustness, Safety, and Generalizability

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.08025 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.08025/

## Key facts

- Cited by 36 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 143 of its 223 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Sep 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 143)

- [Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6572/) (2014)
- [Towards Deep Learning Models Resistant to Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.06083/) (2017)
- [Intriguing properties of neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6199/) (2013)
- [Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning for Fast Adaptation of Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.03400/) (2017)
- [Towards Evaluating the Robustness of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.04644/) (2016)
- [Trust Region Policy Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.05477/) (2015)
- [CARLA: An Open Urban Driving Simulator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03938/) (2017)
- [Domain Randomization for Transferring Deep Neural Networks from Simulation to the Real World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06907/) (2017)
- [Hindsight Experience Replay](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.01495/) (2017)
- [Constrained Policy Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.10528/) (2017)
- [Solving Rubik's Cube with a Robot Hand](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.07113/) (2019)
- [Sim-to-Real Transfer of Robotic Control with Dynamics Randomization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.06537/) (2017)
- [robosuite: A Modular Simulation Framework and Benchmark for Robot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.12293/) (2020)
- [Learning Robust Rewards with Adversarial Inverse Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.11248/) (2017)
- [Leveraging Procedural Generation to Benchmark Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01588/) (2019)
- [Robust Adversarial Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.02702/) (2017)
- [Learning Invariant Representations for Reinforcement Learning without Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10742/) (2020)
- [Reward Constrained Policy Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.11074/) (2018)
- [Sim-to-Real Transfer in Deep Reinforcement Learning for Robotics: a Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.13303/) (2020)
- [Safe Learning in Robotics: From Learning-Based Control to Safe Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06266/) (2021)
- [Safe Model-based Reinforcement Learning with Stability Guarantees](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.08551/) (2017)
- [Risk-Constrained Reinforcement Learning with Percentile Risk Criteria](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.01629/) (2015)
- [Certifying Some Distributional Robustness with Principled Adversarial Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10571/) (2017)
- [On the Effectiveness of Interval Bound Propagation for Training Verifiably Robust Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.12715/) (2018)
- [Adversarial Attacks on Neural Network Policies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.02284/) (2017)
- [Sim-to-Real: Learning Agile Locomotion For Quadruped Robots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.10332/) (2018)
- [Responsive Safety in Reinforcement Learning by PID Lagrangian Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.03964/) (2020)
- [Reinforcement Learning in Healthcare: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.08796/) (2019)
- [A Survey of Inverse Reinforcement Learning: Challenges, Methods and Progress](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.06877/) (2018)
- [End-to-End Safe Reinforcement Learning through Barrier Functions for Safety-Critical Continuous Control Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.08792/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [PKU-SafeRLHF: Towards Multi-Level Safety Alignment for LLMs with Human Preference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.15513/) (2024)
- [Safety-Gymnasium: A Unified Safe Reinforcement Learning Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12567/) (2023)
- [Constrained Decision Transformer for Offline Safe Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.07351/) (2023)
- [Datasets and Benchmarks for Offline Safe Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09303/) (2023)
- [Curriculum Reinforcement Learning using Optimal Transport via Gradual Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10195/) (2022)
- [Safe Offline Reinforcement Learning with Real-Time Budget Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00603/) (2023)
- [Soft Robust MDPs and Risk-Sensitive MDPs: Equivalence, Policy Gradient, and Sample Complexity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11626/) (2023)
- [Safety-aware Causal Representation for Trustworthy Offline Reinforcement Learning in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10747/) (2023)
- [Robust multi-agent coordination via evolutionary generation of auxiliary adversarial attackers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05909/) (2023)
- [Learning Shared Safety Constraints from Multi-task Demonstrations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.00711/) (2023)
- [Off-Policy Primal-Dual Safe Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14758/) (2024)
- [CaDRE: Controllable and Diverse Generation of Safety-Critical Driving Scenarios using Real-World Trajectories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13208/) (2024)
- [Continual Vision-based Reinforcement Learning with Group Symmetries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.12301/) (2022)
- [Gradient Shaping for Multi-Constraint Safe Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.15127/) (2023)
- [Dynamics as Prompts: In-Context Learning for Sim-to-Real System Identifications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.20357/) (2024)
- [Optimal Transport Perturbations for Safe Reinforcement Learning with Robustness Guarantees](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13375/) (2023)
- [Beyond the Edge: An Advanced Exploration of Reinforcement Learning for Mobile Edge Computing, its Applications, and Future Research Trajectories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14238/) (2024)
- [Beyond Black-Box Advice: Learning-Augmented Algorithms for MDPs with Q-Value Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10524/) (2023)
- [Group Distributionally Robust Reinforcement Learning with Hierarchical Latent Variables](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.12262/) (2022)
- [Latent Safety-Constrained Policy Approach for Safe Offline Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.08794/) (2024)
- [Communication-Robust Multi-Agent Learning by Adaptable Auxiliary Multi-Agent Adversary Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05116/) (2023)
- [Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning: Methods, Applications, Visionary Prospects, and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10091/) (2023)
- [Generalizable Resource Scaling of 5G Slices using Constrained Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09290/) (2023)
- [Robust Multi-agent Communication via Multi-view Message Certification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13936/) (2023)
- [Stackelberg Driver Model for Continual Policy Improvement in Scenario-Based Closed-Loop Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.14235/) (2023)
- [Feasibility Consistent Representation Learning for Safe Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.11718/) (2024)
- [Safe Reinforcement Learning using Finite-Horizon Gradient-based Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.11138/) (2024)
- [Tolerance of Reinforcement Learning Controllers against Deviations in Cyber Physical Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.17066/) (2024)
- [Learning Robust Policies via Interpretable Hamilton-Jacobi Reachability-Guided Disturbances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.19746/) (2024)
- [Offline Constrained Reinforcement Learning under Partial Data Coverage](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17506/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

A trustworthy reinforcement learning algorithm should be competent in solving challenging real-world problems, including {robustly} handling uncertainties, satisfying {safety} constraints to avoid catastrophic failures, and {generalizing} to unseen scenarios during deployments. This study aims to overview these main perspectives of trustworthy reinforcement learning considering its intrinsic vulnerabilities on robustness, safety, and generalizability. In particular, we give rigorous formulations, categorize corresponding methodologies, and discuss benchmarks for each perspective. Moreover, we provide an outlook section to spur promising future directions with a brief discussion on extrinsic vulnerabilities considering human feedback. We hope this survey could bring together separate threads of studies together in a unified framework and promote the trustworthiness of reinforcement learning.