Related papers: Safe Reinforcement Learning with Linear Function A…
We study the problem of episodic reinforcement learning in continuous state-action spaces with unknown rewards and transitions. Specifically, we consider the setting where the rewards and transitions are modeled using parametric bilinear…
In many real-world applications such as recommendation systems, multiple learning agents must balance exploration and exploitation while maintaining safety guarantees to avoid catastrophic failures. We study the stochastic linear bandit…
During initial iterations of training in most Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms, agents perform a significant number of random exploratory steps. In the real world, this can limit the practicality of these algorithms as it can lead to…
In the trial-and-error mechanism of reinforcement learning (RL), a notorious contradiction arises when we expect to learn a safe policy: how to learn a safe policy without enough data and prior model about the dangerous region? Existing…
An important facet of reinforcement learning (RL) has to do with how the agent goes about exploring the environment. Traditional exploration strategies typically focus on efficiency and ignore safety. However, for practical applications,…
This paper presents the concept of an adaptive safe padding that forces Reinforcement Learning (RL) to synthesise optimal control policies while ensuring safety during the learning process. Policies are synthesised to satisfy a goal,…
Linear dynamical systems that obey stochastic differential equations are canonical models. While optimal control of known systems has a rich literature, the problem is technically hard under model uncertainty and there are hardly any…
Self-play, where the algorithm learns by playing against itself without requiring any direct supervision, has become the new weapon in modern Reinforcement Learning (RL) for achieving superhuman performance in practice. However, the…
The increasing use of autonomous and semi-autonomous agents in society has made it crucial to validate their safety. However, the complex scenarios in which they are used may make formal verification impossible. To address this challenge,…
Apprenticeship learning (AL) is a kind of Learning from Demonstration techniques where the reward function of a Markov Decision Process (MDP) is unknown to the learning agent and the agent has to derive a good policy by observing an…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms have found limited success beyond simulated applications, and one main reason is the absence of safety guarantees during the learning process. Real world systems would realistically fail or break…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has achieved tremendous success in recent years. However, the classical foundations of RL do not account for the risk sensitivity of the objective function, which is critical in various fields, including…
Many real-world applications, such as those in medical domains, recommendation systems, etc, can be formulated as large state space reinforcement learning problems with only a small budget of the number of policy changes, i.e., low…
A standard assumption in Reinforcement Learning is that the agent observes every visited state-action pair in the associated Markov Decision Process (MDP), along with the per-step rewards. Strong theoretical results are known in this…
Temporal difference learning (TD) is a simple iterative algorithm used to estimate the value function corresponding to a given policy in a Markov decision process. Although TD is one of the most widely used algorithms in reinforcement…
In many modern applications, a system must dynamically choose between several adaptive learning algorithms that are trained online. Examples include model selection in streaming environments, switching between trading strategies in finance,…
We consider model selection for classic Reinforcement Learning (RL) environments -- Multi Armed Bandits (MABs) and Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) -- under general function approximations. In the model selection framework, we do not know…
We study the problem of online learning in a class of Markov decision processes known as linearly solvable MDPs. In the stationary version of this problem, a learner interacts with its environment by directly controlling the state…
Ensuring the safety of reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms is crucial to unlock their potential for many real-world tasks. However, vanilla RL and most safe RL approaches do not guarantee safety. In recent years, several methods have…
In this paper, the issue of model uncertainty in safety-critical control is addressed with a data-driven approach. For this purpose, we utilize the structure of an input-ouput linearization controller based on a nominal model along with a…