Related papers: Towards Safe Reinforcement Learning Using NMPC and…
Policy gradient methods are powerful reinforcement learning algorithms and have been demonstrated to solve many complex tasks. However, these methods are also data-inefficient, afflicted with high variance gradient estimates, and frequently…
In real-life scenarios, a Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent aiming to maximise their reward, must often also behave in a safe manner, including at training time. Thus, much attention in recent years has been given to Safe RL, where an agent…
We focus on developing efficient and reliable policy optimization strategies for robot learning with real-world data. In recent years, policy gradient methods have emerged as a promising paradigm for training control policies in simulation.…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has proven a stunning ability to learn optimal policies from data without any prior knowledge on the process. The main drawback of RL is that it is typically very difficult to guarantee stability and safety. On…
This paper studies a deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) based actor critic (AC) reinforcement learning (RL) technique to control a linear discrete-time system with a quadratic control cost while ensuring a constraint on the…
We explore reinforcement learning methods for finding the optimal policy in the linear quadratic regulator (LQR) problem. In particular, we consider the convergence of policy gradient methods in the setting of known and unknown parameters.…
We develop a novel form of differentiable predictive control (DPC) with safety and robustness guarantees based on control barrier functions. DPC is an unsupervised learning-based method for obtaining approximate solutions to explicit model…
Policy gradient methods are widely used for control in reinforcement learning, particularly for the continuous action setting. There have been a host of theoretically sound algorithms proposed for the on-policy setting, due to the existence…
For all its successes, Reinforcement Learning (RL) still struggles to deliver formal guarantees on the closed-loop behavior of the learned policy. Among other things, guaranteeing the safety of RL with respect to safety-critical systems is…
Reinforcement learning (RL) agents are vulnerable to adversarial disturbances, which can deteriorate task performance or compromise safety specifications. Existing methods either address safety requirements under the assumption of no…
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…
Off-policy stochastic actor-critic methods rely on approximating the stochastic policy gradient in order to derive an optimal policy. One may also derive the optimal policy by approximating the action-value gradient. The use of action-value…
Model Predictive Control has been recently proposed as policy approximation for Reinforcement Learning, offering a path towards safe and explainable Reinforcement Learning. This approach has been investigated for Q-learning and actor-critic…
Direct policy search serves as one of the workhorses in modern reinforcement learning (RL), and its applications in continuous control tasks have recently attracted increasing attention. In this work, we investigate the convergence theory…
Nonlinear control systems with partial information to the decision maker are prevalent in a variety of applications. As a step toward studying such nonlinear systems, this work explores reinforcement learning methods for finding the optimal…
Simulation-to-decision learning enables safe policy training in digital environments without risking real-world deployment, and has become essential in mission-critical domains such as supply chains and industrial systems. However,…
Ensuring safety of nonlinear systems under model uncertainty and external disturbances is crucial, especially for real-world control tasks. Predictive methods such as robust model predictive control (RMPC) require solving nonconvex…
While reinforcement learning has shown experimental success in a number of applications, it is known to be sensitive to noise and perturbations in the parameters of the system, leading to high variance in the total reward amongst different…
Deterministic policy gradient algorithms are foundational for actor-critic methods in controlling continuous systems, yet they often encounter inaccuracies due to their dependence on the derivative of the critic's value estimates with…
This paper proposes a framework for safe reinforcement learning that can handle stochastic nonlinear dynamical systems. We focus on the setting where the nominal dynamics are known, and are subject to additive stochastic disturbances with…