Related papers: Learning a Shield from Catastrophic Action Effects…
Safety is still one of the major research challenges in reinforcement learning (RL). In this paper, we address the problem of how to avoid safety violations of RL agents during exploration in probabilistic and partially unknown…
Agents controlled by the output of reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms often transition to unsafe states, particularly in uncertain and partially observable environments. Partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) provide a…
Autonomous systems that rely on learned perception can make unsafe decisions when sensor readings are misclassified. We study shielding for this setting: given a proposed action, a shield blocks actions that could violate safety. We…
We consider partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) modeling an agent that needs a supply of a certain resource (e.g., electricity stored in batteries) to operate correctly. The resource is consumed by agent's actions and…
Safe reinforcement learning (RL) is crucial for real-world applications, and multi-agent interactions introduce additional safety challenges. While Probabilistic Logic Shields (PLS) has been a powerful proposal to enforce safety in…
This paper targets the efficient construction of a safety shield for decision making in scenarios that incorporate uncertainty. Markov decision processes (MDPs) are prominent models to capture such planning problems. Reinforcement learning…
In real-life scenarios, a Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent aiming to maximise their reward, must often also behave in a safe manner, including at training time. Thus, much attention in recent years has been given to Safe RL, where an agent…
Reinforcement learning algorithms discover policies that maximize reward, but do not necessarily guarantee safety during learning or execution phases. We introduce a new approach to learn optimal policies while enforcing properties…
Among approaches for provably safe reinforcement learning, Model Predictive Shielding (MPS) has proven effective at complex tasks in continuous, high-dimensional state spaces, by leveraging a backup policy to ensure safety when the learned…
Most learning algorithms with formal regret guarantees assume that all mistakes are recoverable and essentially rely on trying all possible behaviors. This approach is problematic when some mistakes are "catastrophic", i.e., irreparable. We…
Reinforcement learning is a promising approach to learning control policies for performing complex multi-agent robotics tasks. However, a policy learned in simulation often fails to guarantee even simple safety properties such as obstacle…
Generally intelligent agents exhibit successful behavior across problems in several settings. Endemic in approaches to realize such intelligence in machines is catastrophic forgetting: sequential learning corrupts knowledge obtained earlier…
The standard approach for Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) is to convert them to a fully observed belief-state MDP. However, the belief state depends on the system model and is therefore not viable in reinforcement…
This paper targets control problems that exhibit specific safety and performance requirements. In particular, the aim is to ensure that an agent, operating under uncertainty, will at runtime strictly adhere to such requirements. Previous…
Planning plays an important role in the broad class of decision theory. Planning has drawn much attention in recent work in the robotics and sequential decision making areas. Recently, Reinforcement Learning (RL), as an agent-environment…
We propose a method for tackling catastrophic forgetting in deep reinforcement learning that is \textit{agnostic} to the timescale of changes in the distribution of experiences, does not require knowledge of task boundaries, and can adapt…
Deep reinforcement learning has emerged as a powerful tool for obtaining high-performance policies. However, the safety of these policies has been a long-standing issue. One promising paradigm to guarantee safety is a shield, which shields…
Continual learning refers to the ability of a biological or artificial system to seamlessly learn from continuous streams of information while preventing catastrophic forgetting, i.e., a condition in which new incoming information strongly…
Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has been increasingly used in a wide range of safety-critical applications, which require guaranteed safety (e.g., no unsafe states are ever visited) during the learning process.Unfortunately,…
Continual Learning (CL) considers the problem of training an agent sequentially on a set of tasks while seeking to retain performance on all previous tasks. A key challenge in CL is catastrophic forgetting, which arises when performance on…