Related papers: Efficient and Safe Exploration in Deterministic Ma…
In classical reinforcement learning, when exploring an environment, agents accept arbitrary short term loss for long term gain. This is infeasible for safety critical applications, such as robotics, where even a single unsafe action may…
In environments with uncertain dynamics exploration is necessary to learn how to perform well. Existing reinforcement learning algorithms provide strong exploration guarantees, but they tend to rely on an ergodicity assumption. The essence…
In many real-world applications (e.g., planetary exploration, robot navigation), an autonomous agent must be able to explore a space with guaranteed safety. Most safe exploration algorithms in the field of reinforcement learning and…
Safely exploring environments with a-priori unknown constraints is a fundamental challenge that restricts the autonomy of robots. While safety is paramount, guarantees on sufficient exploration are also crucial for ensuring autonomous task…
This paper aims to put forward the concept that learning to take safe actions in unknown environments, even with probability one guarantees, can be achieved without the need for an unbounded number of exploratory trials, provided that one…
This paper puts forward the concept that learning to take safe actions in unknown environments, even with probability one guarantees, can be achieved without the need for an unbounded number of exploratory trials. This is indeed possible,…
In Interactive Machine Learning (IML), we iteratively make decisions and obtain noisy observations of an unknown function. While IML methods, e.g., Bayesian optimization and active learning, have been successful in applications, on…
Learning-based methods have been successful in solving complex control tasks without significant prior knowledge about the system. However, these methods typically do not provide any safety guarantees, which prevents their use in…
We present a general framework for applying learning algorithms and heuristical guidance to the verification of Markov decision processes (MDPs). The primary goal of our techniques is to improve performance by avoiding an exhaustive…
We present a new framework for motion planning that wraps around existing kinodynamic planners and guarantees recursive feasibility when operating in a priori unknown, static environments. Our approach makes strong guarantees about overall…
This paper investigates the automatic exploration problem under the unknown environment, which is the key point of applying the robotic system to some social tasks. The solution to this problem via stacking decision rules is impossible to…
Sequential decision making using Markov Decision Process underpins many realworld applications. Both model-based and model free methods have achieved strong results in these settings. However, real-world tasks must balance reward…
In this paper, we propose a data-driven robust safety verification framework for stochastic dynamical systems modeled as Markov decision processes with time-varying and uncertain transition probabilities. Rather than assuming access to the…
A key challenge in science and engineering is to design experiments to learn about some unknown quantity of interest. Classical experimental design optimally allocates the experimental budget to maximize a notion of utility (e.g., reduction…
Within the framework of probably approximately correct Markov decision processes (PAC-MDP), much theoretical work has focused on methods to attain near optimality after a relatively long period of learning and exploration. However,…
Safe autonomous navigation is an essential and challenging problem for robots operating in highly unstructured or completely unknown environments. Under these conditions, not only robotic systems must deal with limited localisation…
The deployment of autonomous systems that operate in unstructured environments necessitates algorithms to verify their safety. This can be challenging due to, e.g., black-box components in the control software, or undermodelled dynamics…
In this paper, we consider the problem of safety assessment for Markov decision processes without explicit knowledge of the model. We aim to learn probabilistic safety specifications associated with a given policy without compromising the…
The problem of optimizing unknown costly-to-evaluate functions has been studied for a long time in the context of Bayesian Optimization. Algorithms in this field aim to find the optimizer of the function by asking only a few function…
Markov decision processes model systems subject to nondeterministic and probabilistic uncertainty. A plethora of verification techniques addresses variations of reachability properties, such as: Is there a scheduler resolving the…