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Reinforcement learning (RL) is recognized as lacking generalization and robustness under environmental perturbations, which excessively restricts its application for real-world robotics. Prior work claimed that adding regularization to the…

The difficulty of optimal control problems has classically been characterized in terms of system properties such as minimum eigenvalues of controllability/observability gramians. We revisit these characterizations in the context of the…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been shown to be effective in many scenarios. However, it typically requires the exploration of a sufficiently large number of state-action pairs, some of which may be unsafe. Consequently, its application to…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents require the specification of a reward signal for learning behaviours. However, introduction of corrupt or stochastic rewards can yield high variance in learning. Such corruption may be a direct result of…

In standard reinforcement learning (RL), a learning agent seeks to optimize the overall reward. However, many key aspects of a desired behavior are more naturally expressed as constraints. For instance, the designer may want to limit the…

Reinforcement learning (RL) is used to directly design a control policy using data collected from the system. This paper considers the robustness of controllers trained via model-free RL. The discussion focuses on the standard model-based…

Safety in reinforcement learning (RL) is a key property in both training and execution in many domains such as autonomous driving or finance. In this paper, we formalize it with a constrained RL formulation in the distributional RL setting.…

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) is the problem of inferring the reward function of an agent, given its policy or observed behavior. Analogous to RL, IRL is perceived both as a problem and as a class of methods. By categorically…

Reinforcement learning is a general methodology of adaptive optimal control that has attracted much attention in various fields ranging from video game industry to robot manipulators. Despite its remarkable performance demonstrations, plain…

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have been successfully applied to control tasks associated with unmanned aerial vehicles and robotics. In recent years, safe RL has been proposed to allow the safe execution of RL algorithms in…

Learning with limited labelled data, such as prompting, in-context learning, fine-tuning, meta-learning or few-shot learning, aims to effectively train a model using only a small amount of labelled samples. However, these approaches have…

Reinforcement learning (RL) combines a control problem with statistical estimation: The system dynamics are not known to the agent, but can be learned through experience. A recent line of research casts `RL as inference' and suggests a…

Teams that have trained large Transformer-based models have reported training instabilities at large scale that did not appear when training with the same hyperparameters at smaller scales. Although the causes of such instabilities are of…

Modulation instability is a phenomenon of spontaneous pattern formation in nonlinear media, oftentimes leading to an unpredictable behaviour and a degradation of a signal of interest. We propose an approach based on reinforcement learning…

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…

Reasoning in large language models has long been a central research focus, and recent studies employing reinforcement learning (RL) have introduced diverse methods that yield substantial performance gains with minimal or even no external…

Recent research has turned to Reinforcement Learning (RL) to solve challenging decision problems, as an alternative to hand-tuned heuristics. RL can learn good policies without the need for modeling the environment's dynamics. Despite this…

Why do reinforcement learning (RL) policies fail or succeed? This is a challenging question due to the complex, high-dimensional nature of agent-environment interactions. In this work, we take a causal perspective on explaining the behavior…

Using Reinforcement Learning (RL) in simulation to construct policies useful in real life is challenging. This is often attributed to the sequential decision making aspect: inaccuracies in simulation accumulate over multiple steps, hence…

Deep learning systems achieve remarkable empirical performance, yet the stability of the training process itself remains poorly understood. Training unfolds as a high-dimensional dynamical system in which small perturbations to…