Related papers: CUP: A Conservative Update Policy Algorithm for Sa…
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…
Safe reinforcement learning (RL) with hard constraint guarantees is a promising optimal control direction for multi-energy management systems. It only requires the environment-specific constraint functions itself a priori and not a complete…
Deep Neural Network-based systems are now the state-of-the-art in many robotics tasks, but their application in safety-critical domains remains dangerous without formal guarantees on network robustness. Small perturbations to sensor inputs…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as the predominant paradigm for training large language model (LLM)-based AI agents. However, existing backbone RL algorithms lack verified convergence guarantees in agentic scenarios, especially in…
Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms can achieve state-of-the-art performance in decision-making and continuous control tasks. However, applying RL algorithms on safety-critical systems still needs to be well justified due to the…
The security of cloud environments, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), is complex and dynamic. Static security policies have become inadequate as threats evolve and cloud resources exhibit elasticity [1]. This paper addresses the…
Safe exploration remains a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), limiting the deployment of RL agents in the real world. We propose Sampling-Based Safe Reinforcement Learning (SBSRL), a model-based RL algorithm that…
Reinforcement learning (RL) in the context of control systems offers wide possibilities of controller adaptation. Given an infinite-horizon cost function, the so-called critic of RL approximates it with a neural net and sends this…
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…
Safety guarantees are a prerequisite to the deployment of reinforcement learning (RL) agents in safety-critical tasks. Often, deployment environments exhibit non-stationary dynamics or are subject to changing performance goals, requiring…
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.…
Safe reinforcement learning (RL) is a popular and versatile paradigm to learn reward-maximizing policies with safety guarantees. Previous works tend to express the safety constraints in an expectation form due to the ease of implementation,…
The integration of Reinforcement Learning (RL) and Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) aims at simultaneously exploiting the sample efficiency as well as the diversity and robustness of the two paradigms. Recently, hybrid learning frameworks…
We consider the challenge of finding a deterministic policy for a Markov decision process that uniformly (in all states) maximizes one reward subject to a probabilistic constraint over a different reward. Existing solutions do not fully…
Safe reinforcement learning is extremely challenging--not only must the agent explore an unknown environment, it must do so while ensuring no safety constraint violations. We formulate this safe reinforcement learning (RL) problem using the…
Effectively leveraging large, previously collected datasets in reinforcement learning (RL) is a key challenge for large-scale real-world applications. Offline RL algorithms promise to learn effective policies from previously-collected,…
Recently, there has been a surge in interest in safe and robust techniques within reinforcement learning (RL). Current notions of risk in RL fail to capture the potential for systemic failures such as abrupt stoppages from system failures…
Constrained Reinforcement Learning (CRL) is a subset of machine learning that introduces constraints into the traditional reinforcement learning (RL) framework. Unlike conventional RL which aims solely to maximize cumulative rewards, CRL…
Safe reinforcement learning (RL) offers advanced solutions to constrained optimal control problems. Existing studies in safe RL implicitly assume continuity in policy functions, where policies map states to actions in a smooth,…
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…