Related papers: Safe Value Functions
In safety-critical RL settings, the inclusion of an additional cost function is often favoured over the arduous task of modifying the reward function to ensure the agent's safe behaviour. However, designing or evaluating such a cost…
Reinforcement learning is a powerful technique for developing new robot behaviors. However, typical lack of safety guarantees constitutes a hurdle for its practical application on real robots. To address this issue, safe reinforcement…
This paper investigates the so-called reward-balancing methods, a novel class of algorithms for solving discounted-return reinforcement learning (RL) problems. These methods consist of iteratively adjusting the reward function to transform…
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…
Safe reinforcement learning is a promising path toward applying reinforcement learning algorithms to real-world problems, where suboptimal behaviors may lead to actual negative consequences. In this work, we focus on the setting where…
Designing reward functions for reinforcement learning is difficult: besides specifying which behavior is rewarded for a task, the reward also has to discourage undesired outcomes. Misspecified reward functions can lead to unintended…
We study defense strategies against reward poisoning attacks in reinforcement learning. As a threat model, we consider attacks that minimally alter rewards to make the attacker's target policy uniquely optimal under the poisoned rewards,…
In this two-part study we develop a general approach to the design and analysis of exact penalty functions for various optimal control problems, including problems with terminal and state constraints, problems involving differential…
Humans have the ability to deviate from their natural behavior when necessary, which is a cognitive process called response inhibition. Similar approaches have independently received increasing attention in recent years for ensuring the…
Safe exploration is a key to applying reinforcement learning (RL) in safety-critical systems. Existing safe exploration methods guaranteed safety under the assumption of regularity, and it has been difficult to apply them to large-scale…
In safety-critical domains, reinforcement learning (RL) agents must often satisfy strict, zero-cost safety constraints while accomplishing tasks. Existing model-free methods frequently either fail to achieve near-zero safety violations or…
Recently, there has been a surge of research on a class of methods called feedback optimization. These are methods to steer the state of a control system to an equilibrium that arises as the solution of an optimization problem. Despite the…
We study a new penalty reformulation of constrained convex optimization based on the softplus penalty function. We develop novel and tight upper bounds on the objective value gap and the violation of constraints for the solutions to the…
Constrained Reinforcement Learning has been employed to enforce safety constraints on policy through the use of expected cost constraints. The key challenge is in handling expected cost accumulated using the policy and not just in a single…
Model-free or learning-based control, in particular, reinforcement learning (RL), is expected to be applied for complex robotic tasks. Traditional RL requires a policy to be optimized is state-dependent, that means, the policy is a kind of…
Safe reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn policies that satisfy certain constraints before deploying them to safety-critical applications. Previous primal-dual style approaches suffer from instability issues and lack optimality…
In toxicology research, experiments are often conducted to determine the effect of toxicant exposure on the behavior of mice, where mice are randomized to receive the toxicant or not. In particular, in fixed interval experiments, one…
Satisfying safety constraints is a priority concern when solving optimal control problems (OCPs). Due to the existence of infeasibility phenomenon, where a constraint-satisfying solution cannot be found, it is necessary to identify a…
In many real-world applications, reinforcement learning (RL) agents might have to solve multiple tasks, each one typically modeled via a reward function. If reward functions are expressed linearly, and the agent has previously learned a set…
We consider the control problem with \textit{exit time}. Unlike the Bolza and Mayer problems, in this problem the terminal time of the trajectories is not fixed, but it is the first time at which they reach a given closed subset -…