Related papers: Towards Safe Reinforcement Learning Using NMPC and…
This paper studies an infinite horizon optimal control problem for discrete-time linear system and quadratic criteria, both with random parameters which are independent and identically distributed with respect to time. In this general…
Model predictive control (MPC) is widely used for motion planning, particularly in autonomous driving. Real-time capability of the planner requires utilizing convex approximation of optimal control problems (OCPs) for the planner. However,…
In this work, we introduce a stochastic maximum principle (SMP) approach for solving the reinforcement learning problem with the assumption that the unknowns in the environment can be parameterized based on physics knowledge. For the…
Direct policy gradient methods for reinforcement learning and continuous control problems are a popular approach for a variety of reasons: 1) they are easy to implement without explicit knowledge of the underlying model 2) they are an…
We study the problem of computing deterministic optimal policies for constrained Markov decision processes (MDPs) with continuous state and action spaces, which are widely encountered in constrained dynamical systems. Designing…
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…
Deploying deep reinforcement learning in safety-critical settings requires developing algorithms that obey hard constraints during exploration. This paper contributes a first approach toward enforcing formal safety constraints on end-to-end…
We develop policy gradients methods for stochastic control with exit time in a model-free setting. We propose two types of algorithms for learning either directly the optimal policy or by learning alternately the value function (critic) and…
We consider an improper reinforcement learning setting where a learner is given $M$ base controllers for an unknown Markov decision process, and wishes to combine them optimally to produce a potentially new controller that can outperform…
Policy gradient methods have become a standard for training reinforcement learning agents in a scalable and efficient manner. However, they do not account for transition uncertainty, whereas learning robust policies can be computationally…
Safety is a critical feature of controller design for physical systems. When designing control policies, several approaches to guarantee this aspect of autonomy have been proposed, such as robust controllers or control barrier functions.…
Deep reinforcement learning has been successfully applied to many control tasks, but the application of such agents in safety-critical scenarios has been limited due to safety concerns. Rigorous testing of these controllers is challenging,…
Policy gradient methods in actor-critic reinforcement learning (RL) have become perhaps the most promising approaches to solving continuous optimal control problems. However, the trial-and-error nature of RL and the inherent randomness…
The energy transition has increased the reliance on intermittent energy sources, destabilizing energy markets and causing unprecedented volatility, culminating in the global energy crisis of 2021. In addition to harming producers and…
We provide performance guarantees for a variant of simulation-based policy iteration for controlling Markov decision processes that involves the use of stochastic approximation algorithms along with state-of-the-art techniques that are…
We introduce a simple but effective method for managing risk in model-based reinforcement learning with trajectory sampling that involves probabilistic safety constraints and balancing of optimism in the face of epistemic uncertainty and…
Risk-bounded motion planning is an important yet difficult problem for safety-critical tasks. While existing mathematical programming methods offer theoretical guarantees in the context of constrained Markov decision processes, they either…
We study the safe reinforcement learning problem with nonlinear function approximation, where policy optimization is formulated as a constrained optimization problem with both the objective and the constraint being nonconvex functions. For…
Policy gradient methods, where one searches for the policy of interest by maximizing the value functions using first-order information, become increasingly popular for sequential decision making in reinforcement learning, games, and…
The unaffordable computation load of nonlinear model predictive control (NMPC) has prevented it for being used in robots with high sampling rates for decades. This paper is concerned with the policy learning problem for nonlinear MPC with…