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Minimizing the empirical risk is a popular training strategy, but for learning tasks where the data may be noisy or heavy-tailed, one may require many observations in order to generalize well. To achieve better performance under less…
This paper considers the problem of learning safe policies in the context of reinforcement learning (RL). In particular, we consider the notion of probabilistic safety. This is, we aim to design policies that maintain the state of the…
Achieving highly dynamic behaviors on humanoid robots, such as running, requires controllers that are both robust and precise, and hence difficult to design. Classical control methods offer valuable insight into how such systems can…
Model-based reinforcement learning is a powerful tool, but collecting data to fit an accurate model of the system can be costly. Exploring an unknown environment in a sample-efficient manner is hence of great importance. However, the…
Deep reinforcement learning has proven remarkably useful in training agents from unstructured data. However, the opacity of the produced agents makes it difficult to ensure that they adhere to various requirements posed by human engineers.…
Likelihood-based policy gradient methods are the dominant approach for training robot control policies from rewards. These methods rely on differentiable action likelihoods, which constrain policy outputs to simple distributions like…
We develop a machine-learning framework to learn hyperparameter sequences for accelerated first-order methods (e.g., the step size and momentum sequences in accelerated gradient descent) to quickly solve parametric convex optimization…
Curriculum learning--ordering training examples in a sequence to aid machine learning--takes inspiration from human learning, but has not gained widespread acceptance. Static strategies for scoring item difficulty rely on indirect proxy…
Ensuring safety in robotic systems remains a fundamental challenge, especially when deploying offline policy-learning methods such as imitation learning in dynamic environments. Traditional behavior cloning (BC) often fails to generalize…
We study automated intrusion prevention using reinforcement learning. In a novel approach, we formulate the problem of intrusion prevention as an optimal stopping problem. This formulation allows us insight into the structure of the optimal…
Shifting from traditional control strategies to Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) for legged robots poses inherent challenges, especially when addressing real-world physical constraints during training. While high-fidelity simulations…
Practitioners often rely on compute-intensive domain randomization to ensure reinforcement learning policies trained in simulation can robustly transfer to the real world. Due to unmodeled nonlinearities in the real system, however, even…
Real-life control tasks involve matters of various substances---rigid or soft bodies, liquid, gas---each with distinct physical behaviors. This poses challenges to traditional rigid-body physics engines. Particle-based simulators have been…
In the field of autonomous robots, reinforcement learning (RL) is an increasingly used method to solve the task of dynamic obstacle avoidance for mobile robots, autonomous ships, and drones. A common practice to train those agents is to use…
Pedipulation leverages the feet of legged robots for mobile manipulation, eliminating the need for dedicated robotic arms. While previous works have showcased blind and task-specific pedipulation skills, they fail to account for static and…
Legged robots pose one of the greatest challenges in robotics. Dynamic and agile maneuvers of animals cannot be imitated by existing methods that are crafted by humans. A compelling alternative is reinforcement learning, which requires…
Mobile robot navigation in complex and dynamic environments is a challenging but important problem. Reinforcement learning approaches fail to solve these tasks efficiently due to reward sparsities, temporal complexities and…
We propose a novel gradient-based online optimization framework for solving stochastic programming problems that frequently arise in the context of cyber-physical and robotic systems. Our problem formulation accommodates constraints that…
Reinforcement learning (RL) offers a capable and intuitive structure for the fundamental sequential decision-making problem. Despite impressive breakthroughs, it can still be difficult to employ RL in practice in many simple applications.…
The performance of reinforcement learning depends upon designing an appropriate action space, where the effect of each action is measurable, yet, granular enough to permit flexible behavior. So far, this process involved non-trivial user…