Related papers: Data Generation Method for Learning a Low-dimensio…

Recent developments in sequential experimental design look to construct a policy that can efficiently navigate the design space, in a way that maximises the expected information gain. Whilst there is work on achieving tractable policies for…

Random exploration is one of the main mechanisms through which reinforcement learning (RL) finds well-performing policies. However, it can lead to undesirable or catastrophic outcomes when learning online in safety-critical environments. In…

Reinforcement learning is one of the core components in designing an artificial intelligent system emphasizing real-time response. Reinforcement learning influences the system to take actions within an arbitrary environment either having…

In safety-critical applications, autonomous agents may need to learn in an environment where mistakes can be very costly. In such settings, the agent needs to behave safely not only after but also while learning. To achieve this, existing…

Reinforcement Learning is an area of Machine Learning focused on how agents can be trained to make sequential decisions, and achieve a particular goal within an arbitrary environment. While learning, they repeatedly take actions based on…

Risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RL) is crucial for maintaining reliable performance in high-stakes applications. While traditional RL methods aim to learn a point estimate of the random cumulative cost, distributional RL (DRL) seeks…

This research proposes a new integrated framework for identifying safe landing locations and planning in-flight divert maneuvers. The state-of-the-art algorithms for landing zone selection utilize local terrain features such as slopes and…

We consider the problem of reinforcement learning when provided with (1) a baseline control policy and (2) a set of constraints that the learner must satisfy. The baseline policy can arise from demonstration data or a teacher agent and may…

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) seeks to mitigate unsafe behaviors that arise from exploration during training by reducing constraint violations while maintaining task performance. Existing approaches typically rely on a single policy to…

We study the problem of safe learning and exploration in sequential control problems. The goal is to safely collect data samples from operating in an environment, in order to learn to achieve a challenging control goal (e.g., an agile…

Safety assurance is uncompromisable for safety-critical environments with the presence of drastic model uncertainties (e.g., distributional shift), especially with humans in the loop. However, incorporating uncertainty in safe learning will…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is essentially a trial-and-error learning procedure which may cause unsafe behavior during the exploration-and-exploitation process. This hinders the application of RL to real-world control problems, especially…

Constrained reinforcement learning is to maximize the expected reward subject to constraints on utilities/costs. However, the training environment may not be the same as the test one, due to, e.g., modeling error, adversarial attack,…

Recent advances have shown that video generation models can enhance robot learning by deriving effective robot actions through inverse dynamics. However, these methods heavily depend on the quality of generated data and struggle with…

We investigate how reinforcement learning can be used to train level-designing agents. This represents a new approach to procedural content generation in games, where level design is framed as a game, and the content generator itself is…

This dissertation investigates how reinforcement learning (RL) methods can be designed to be safe, sample-efficient, and robust. Framed through the unifying perspective of contextual-bandit RL, the work addresses two major application…

Policy-gradient approaches to reinforcement learning have two common and undesirable overhead procedures, namely warm-start training and sample variance reduction. In this paper, we describe a reinforcement learning method based on a…

Active learning is a subfield of machine learning that is devised for design and modeling of systems with highly expensive sampling costs. Industrial and engineering systems are generally subject to physics constraints that may induce fatal…

Safe Reinforcement Learning (Safe RL) aims to ensure safety when an RL agent conducts learning by interacting with real-world environments where improper actions can induce high costs or lead to severe consequences. In this paper, we…

Model-based reinforcement learning is an effective approach for controlling an unknown system. It is based on a longstanding pipeline familiar to the control community in which one performs experiments on the environment to collect a…