Related papers: SafeLife 1.0: Exploring Side Effects in Complex En…
AI systems empowered by reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms harbor the immense potential to catalyze societal advancement, yet their deployment is often impeded by significant safety concerns. Particularly in safety-critical…
Reinforcement learning algorithms can train agents that solve problems in complex, interesting environments. Normally, the complexity of the trained agent is closely related to the complexity of the environment. This suggests that a highly…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown remarkable success in solving relatively complex tasks, yet the deployment of RL systems in real-world scenarios poses significant challenges related to safety and robustness. This paper aims to…
Safety is a crucial property of every robotic platform: any control policy should always comply with actuator limits and avoid collisions with the environment and humans. In reinforcement learning, safety is even more fundamental for…
The desire to use reinforcement learning in safety-critical settings has inspired a recent interest in formal methods for learning algorithms. Existing formal methods for learning and optimization primarily consider the problem of…
Autonomous agents trained via reinforcement learning present numerous safety concerns: reward hacking, negative side effects, and unsafe exploration, among others. In the context of near-future autonomous agents, operating in environments…
How can we design safe reinforcement learning agents that avoid unnecessary disruptions to their environment? We show that current approaches to penalizing side effects can introduce bad incentives, e.g. to prevent any irreversible changes…
We propose to leverage epistemic uncertainty about constraint satisfaction of a reinforcement learner in safety critical domains. We introduce a framework for specification of requirements for reinforcement learners in constrained settings,…
Reinforcement learning (RL) offers a compelling data-driven paradigm for synthesizing controllers for complex systems when accurate physical models are unavailable; however, most existing control-oriented RL methods assume stationarity and,…
Safe reinforcement learning (Safe RL) aims to ensure policy performance while satisfying safety constraints. However, most existing Safe RL methods assume benign environments, making them vulnerable to adversarial perturbations commonly…
While safe reinforcement learning (RL) holds great promise for many practical applications like robotics or autonomous cars, current approaches require specifying constraints in mathematical form. Such specifications demand domain…
We propose a framework for ensuring safe behavior of a reinforcement learning agent when the reward function may be difficult to specify. In order to do this, we rely on the existence of demonstrations from expert policies, and we provide a…
Reinforcement learning (RL) in real-world safety-critical target settings like urban driving is hazardous, imperiling the RL agent, other agents, and the environment. To overcome this difficulty, we propose a "safety-critical adaptation"…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) is widely used in tasks where agents interact with an environment to maximize rewards. Building on this foundation, Safe Reinforcement Learning (Safe RL) incorporates a cost metric alongside the reward metric,…
Reinforcement learning (RL) controllers are flexible and performant but rarely guarantee safety. Safety filters impart hard safety guarantees to RL controllers while maintaining flexibility. However, safety filters can cause undesired…
Reinforcement learning often uses neural networks to solve complex control tasks. However, neural networks are sensitive to input perturbations, which makes their deployment in safety-critical environments challenging. This work lifts…
The deployment of autonomous robots in safety-critical applications requires safety guarantees. Provably safe reinforcement learning is an active field of research that aims to provide such guarantees using safeguards. These safeguards…
Reinforcement learning (RL) in the real world necessitates the development of procedures that enable agents to explore without causing harm to themselves or others. The most successful solutions to the problem of safe RL leverage offline…
Designing hierarchical reinforcement learning algorithms that exhibit safe behaviour is not only vital for practical applications but also, facilitates a better understanding of an agent's decisions. We tackle this problem in the options…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has achieved tremendous success in many complex decision-making tasks. However, safety concerns are raised during deploying RL in real-world applications, leading to a growing demand for safe RL algorithms, such…