Related papers: Safe Exploration in Markov Decision Processes
Our work aims at developing reinforcement learning algorithms that do not rely on the Markov assumption. We consider the class of Non-Markov Decision Processes where histories can be abstracted into a finite set of states while preserving…
Continuous-time Markov decision processes are an important class of models in a wide range of applications, ranging from cyber-physical systems to synthetic biology. A central problem is how to devise a policy to control the system in order…
What is a good exploration strategy for an agent that interacts with an environment in the absence of external rewards? Ideally, we would like to get a policy driving towards a uniform state-action visitation (highly exploring) in a minimum…
Euclidean Markov decision processes are a powerful tool for modeling control problems under uncertainty over continuous domains. Finite state imprecise, Markov decision processes can be used to approximate the behavior of these infinite…
Efficient exploration remains a central challenge in reinforcement learning, serving as a useful pretraining objective for data collection, particularly when an external reward function is unavailable. A principled formulation of the…
We consider discounted infinite-horizon constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs), where the goal is to find an optimal policy that maximizes the expected cumulative reward while satisfying expected cumulative constraints. Motivated by…
Practical reinforcement learning problems are often formulated as constrained Markov decision process (CMDP) problems, in which the agent has to maximize the expected return while satisfying a set of prescribed safety constraints. In this…
Deep reinforcement learning is an increasingly popular technique for synthesising policies to control an agent's interaction with its environment. There is also growing interest in formally verifying that such policies are correct and…
Safe exploration aims at addressing the limitations of Reinforcement Learning (RL) in safety-critical scenarios, where failures during trial-and-error learning may incur high costs. Several methods exist to incorporate external knowledge or…
In this paper we consider the problem of how a reinforcement learning agent that is tasked with solving a sequence of reinforcement learning problems (a sequence of Markov decision processes) can use knowledge acquired early in its lifetime…
Qualitative opacity of a secret is a security property, which means that a system trajectory satisfying the secret is observation-equivalent to a trajectory violating the secret. In this paper, we study how to synthesize a control policy…
Exploration remains a key challenge in deep reinforcement learning (RL). Optimism in the face of uncertainty is a well-known heuristic with theoretical guarantees in the tabular setting, but how best to translate the principle to deep…
Motivated by the prevailing paradigm of using unsupervised learning for efficient exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) problems [tang2017exploration,bellemare2016unifying], we investigate when this paradigm is provably efficient. We…
Providing finite-time probabilistic safety and reach-avoid guarantees is crucial for safety-critical stochastic systems. Existing state-of-the-art barrier methods often rely on a restrictive boundedness assumption for auxiliary functions,…
We address the problem of controlling a mobile robot to explore a partially known environment. The robot's objective is the maximization of the amount of information collected about the environment. We formulate the problem as a partially…
Reinforcement learning algorithms struggle when the reward signal is very sparse. In these cases, naive random exploration methods essentially rely on a random walk to stumble onto a rewarding state. Recent works utilize intrinsic…
In Offline Model Learning for Planning and in Offline Reinforcement Learning, the limited data set hinders the estimate of the Value function of the relative Markov Decision Process (MDP). Consequently, the performance of the obtained…
We study reinforcement learning from human feedback in general Markov decision processes, where agents learn from trajectory-level preference comparisons. A central challenge in this setting is to design algorithms that select informative…
This paper addresses the problem of planning a safe (i.e., collision-free) trajectory from an initial state to a goal region when the obstacle space is a-priori unknown and is incrementally revealed online, e.g., through line-of-sight…
The process of discovery requires active exploration -- the act of collecting new and informative data. However, efficient autonomous exploration remains a major unsolved problem. The dominant paradigm addresses this challenge by using…