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Regression adjustments are often considered by investigators to improve the estimation efficiency of causal effect in randomized experiments when there exists many pre-experiment covariates. In this paper, we provide conditions that…
Autonomous agents optimize the reward function we give them. What they don't know is how hard it is for us to design a reward function that actually captures what we want. When designing the reward, we might think of some specific training…
We study a security threat to reinforcement learning where an attacker poisons the learning environment to force the agent into executing a target policy chosen by the attacker. As a victim, we consider RL agents whose objective is to find…
Behavior cloning of expert demonstrations can speed up learning optimal policies in a more sample-efficient way over reinforcement learning. However, the policy cannot extrapolate well to unseen states outside of the demonstration data,…
Offline reinforcement learning enables agents to leverage large pre-collected datasets of environment transitions to learn control policies, circumventing the need for potentially expensive or unsafe online data collection. Significant…
Learning a reward function from demonstrations suffers from low sample-efficiency. Even with abundant data, current inverse reinforcement learning methods that focus on learning from a single environment can fail to handle slight changes in…
Reachability analysis, in general, is a fundamental method that supports formally-correct synthesis, robust model predictive control, set-based observers, fault detection, invariant computation, and conformance checking, to name but a few.…
The cost of error in many high-stakes settings is asymmetric: misdiagnosing pneumonia when absent is an inconvenience, but failing to detect it when present can be life-threatening. Because of this, artificial intelligence (AI) models used…
We study AI alignment through the lens of law-and-economics models of deterrence and enforcement. In these models, misconduct is not treated as an external failure, but as a strategic response to incentives: an actor weighs the gain from…
We develop a framework for interacting with uncertain environments in reinforcement learning (RL) by leveraging preferences in the form of utility functions. We claim that there is value in considering different risk measures during…
Discontinuities can be fairly arbitrary but also cause a significant impact on outcomes in larger systems. Indeed, their arbitrariness is why they have been used to infer causal relationships among variables in numerous settings. Regression…
There has been significant progress in deep reinforcement learning (RL) in recent years. Nevertheless, finding suitable hyperparameter configurations and reward functions remains challenging even for experts, and performance heavily relies…
As reinforcement learning agents become increasingly integrated into complex, real-world environments, designing for safety becomes a critical consideration. We specifically focus on researching scenarios where agents can cause undesired…
In many scenarios, a principal dynamically interacts with an agent and offers a sequence of incentives to align the agent's behavior with a desired objective. This paper focuses on the problem of synthesizing an incentive sequence that,…
While enforcing egalitarian social norms is critical for human society, punishing social norm violators often incurs a cost to the self. This cost looms even larger when one can benefit from an unequal distribution of resources (i.e.…
Policies trained via reinforcement learning (RL) are often very complex even for simple tasks. In an episode with $n$ time steps, a policy will make $n$ decisions on actions to take, many of which may appear non-intuitive to the observer.…
Reinforcement learning algorithms typically necessitate extensive exploration of the state space to find optimal policies. However, in safety-critical applications, the risks associated with such exploration can lead to catastrophic…
Finding meaningful and accurate dense rewards is a fundamental task in the field of reinforcement learning (RL) that enables agents to explore environments more efficiently. In traditional RL settings, agents learn optimal policies through…
In reinforcement learning, a decision needs to be made at some point as to whether it is worthwhile to carry on with the learning process or to terminate it. In many such situations, stochastic elements are often present which govern the…
Safety controllers is widely used to achieve safe reinforcement learning. Most methods that apply a safety controller are using handcrafted safety constraints to construct the safety controller. However, when the environment dynamics are…