Related papers: Safe Value Functions
Safe Reinforcement Learning (RL) plays an important role in applying RL algorithms to safety-critical real-world applications, addressing the trade-off between maximizing rewards and adhering to safety constraints. This work introduces a…
Real-world reinforcement learning (RL) problems often demand that agents behave safely by obeying a set of designed constraints. We address the challenge of safe RL by coupling a safety guide based on model predictive control (MPC) with a…
We show that when a third party, the adversary, steps into the two-party setting (agent and operator) of safely interruptible reinforcement learning, a trade-off has to be made between the probability of following the optimal policy in the…
Reward design is a fundamental problem in reinforcement learning (RL). A misspecified or poorly designed reward can result in low sample efficiency and undesired behaviors. In this paper, we propose the idea of programmatic reward design,…
Autonomous systems have witnessed a rapid increase in their capabilities, but it remains a challenge for them to perform tasks both effectively and safely. The fact that performance and safety can sometimes be competing objectives renders…
In the field of reinforcement learning (RL), agents are often tasked with solving a variety of problems differing only in their reward functions. In order to quickly obtain solutions to unseen problems with new reward functions, a popular…
Safe control methods are often intended to behave safely even in worst-case human uncertainties. However, humans may exploit such safety-first systems, which results in greater risk for everyone. Despite their significance, no prior work…
Safe learning and optimization deals with learning and optimization problems that avoid, as much as possible, the evaluation of non-safe input points, which are solutions, policies, or strategies that cause an irrecoverable loss (e.g.,…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) uses rewards to guide learning, yet reward design is typically hand-crafted using heuristics that can be difficult to tune. We propose a Control Barrier Function (CBF)-informed reward design for Multi-Agent RL…
In order to solve a task using reinforcement learning, it is necessary to first formalise the goal of that task as a reward function. However, for many real-world tasks, it is very difficult to manually specify a reward function that never…
Penalty functions are widely used to enforce constraints in optimization problems and reinforcement leaning algorithms. Softplus and algebraic penalty functions are proposed to overcome the sensitivity of the Courant-Beltrami method to…
This paper presents two new control approaches for guaranteed safety (remaining in a safe set) subject to actuator constraints (the control is in a convex polytope). The control signals are computed using real-time optimization, including…
Despite recent successes in Reinforcement Learning, value-based methods often suffer from high variance hindering performance. In this paper, we illustrate this in a continuous control setting where state of the art methods perform poorly…
The concept of the value-gradient is introduced and developed in the context of reinforcement learning. It is shown that by learning the value-gradients exploration or stochastic behaviour is no longer needed to find locally optimal…
It is quite challenging to ensure the safety of reinforcement learning (RL) agents in an unknown and stochastic environment under hard constraints that require the system state not to reach certain specified unsafe regions. Many popular…
We consider a one-period Kyle (1985) framework where the insider can be subject to a penalty if she trades. We establish existence and uniqueness of equilibrium for virtually any penalty function when noise is uniform. In equilibrium, the…
In recent years, the analysis of a control barrier function has received considerable attention because it is helpful for the safety-critical control required in many control application problems. While the extension of the analysis to a…
In some agent designs like inverse reinforcement learning an agent needs to learn its own reward function. Learning the reward function and optimising for it are typically two different processes, usually performed at different stages. We…
The extremum value theorem for function spaces plays the central role in optimal control. It is known that computation of optimal control actions and policies is often prone to numerical errors which may be related to computability issues.…
In many resource-limited optimal control problems, multiple constraints may be enforced that are jointly infeasible due to external factors such as subsystem failures, unexpected disturbances, or fuel limitations. In this manuscript, we…