Related papers: Safe Exploration in Markov Decision Processes
Reinforcement learning has been successfully used to solve difficult tasks in complex unknown environments. However, these methods typically do not provide any safety guarantees during the learning process. This is particularly problematic,…
Autonomous exploration of obstacle-rich spaces requires strategies that ensure efficiency while guaranteeing safety against collisions with obstacles. This paper investigates a novel platform-agnostic reinforcement learning framework that…
Reinforcement learning systems are often concerned with balancing exploration of untested actions against exploitation of actions that are known to be good. The benefit of exploration can be estimated using the classical notion of Value of…
Policy Gradient (PG) algorithms are among the best candidates for the much-anticipated applications of reinforcement learning to real-world control tasks, such as robotics. However, the trial-and-error nature of these methods poses safety…
Building agents that can explore their environments intelligently is a challenging open problem. In this paper, we make a step towards understanding how a hierarchical design of the agent's policy can affect its exploration capabilities.…
We consider the problem of minimizing a certainty equivalent of the total or discounted cost over a finite and an infinite time horizon which is generated by a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP). The certainty equivalent…
It is quite challenging to ensure the safety of reinforcement learning (RL) agents in an unknown and stochastic environment under hard constraints that require the system state not to reach certain specified unsafe regions. Many popular…
Ensuring the safety of environmental exploration is a critical problem in reinforcement learning (RL). While limiting exploration to a feasible zone has become widely accepted as a way to ensure safety, key questions remain unresolved: what…
We introduce a generic strategy for provably efficient multi-goal exploration. It relies on AdaGoal, a novel goal selection scheme that leverages a measure of uncertainty in reaching states to adaptively target goals that are neither too…
In online reinforcement learning, data scarcity creates epistemic uncertainty that makes robustness important early in learning, whereas sufficient exploration is needed to learn the true-environment optimal policy. We study this…
Recent research in multi-robot exploration and mapping has focused on sampling environmental fields, which are typically modeled using the Gaussian process (GP). Existing information-theoretic exploration strategies for learning GP-based…
Reinforcement learning is a powerful paradigm for learning optimal policies from experimental data. However, to find optimal policies, most reinforcement learning algorithms explore all possible actions, which may be harmful for real-world…
In reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms, exploratory control inputs are used during learning to acquire knowledge for decision making and control, while the true dynamics of a controlled object is unknown. However, this exploring property…
An inherent problem of reinforcement learning is performing exploration of an environment through random actions, of which a large portion can be unproductive. Instead, exploration can be improved by initializing the learning policy with an…
Safety in stochastic control systems, which are subject to random noise with a known probability distribution, aims to compute policies that satisfy predefined operational constraints with high confidence throughout the uncertain evolution…
We consider a robust approach to address uncertainty in model parameters in Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), which are widely used to model dynamic optimization in many applications. Most prior works consider the case where the uncertainty…
An important facet of reinforcement learning (RL) has to do with how the agent goes about exploring the environment. Traditional exploration strategies typically focus on efficiency and ignore safety. However, for practical applications,…
Standard Markov decision process (MDP) and reinforcement learning algorithms optimize the policy with respect to the expected gain. We propose an algorithm which enables to optimize an alternative objective: the probability that the gain is…
Safety is crucial for robotic missions within an uncertain environment. Common safety requirements such as collision avoidance are only state-dependent, which can be restrictive for complex missions. In this work, we address a more general…
We propose a novel constrained reinforcement learning method for finding optimal policies in Markov Decision Processes while satisfying temporal logic constraints with a desired probability throughout the learning process. An…