Safe Exploration in Continuous Action Spaces
  We address the problem of deploying a reinforcement learning (RL) agent on a
physical system such as a datacenter cooling unit or robot, where critical
constraints must never be violated. We show how to exploit the typically smooth
dynamics of these systems and enable RL algorithms to never violate constraints
during learning. Our technique is to directly add to the policy a safety layer
that analytically solves an action correction formulation per each state. The
novelty of obtaining an elegant closed-form solution is attained due to a
linearized model, learned on past trajectories consisting of arbitrary actions.
This is to mimic the real-world circumstances where data logs were generated
with a behavior policy that is implausible to describe mathematically; such
cases render the known safety-aware off-policy methods inapplicable. We
demonstrate the efficacy of our approach on new representative physics-based
environments, and prevail where reward shaping fails by maintaining zero
constraint violations.
