Related papers: Finding Safe Zones of policies Markov Decision Pro…
In this paper, we consider the problem of safety assessment for Markov decision processes without explicit knowledge of the model. We aim to learn probabilistic safety specifications associated with a given policy without compromising the…
In this paper, we present an online reinforcement learning algorithm for constrained Markov decision processes with a safety constraint. Despite the necessary attention of the scientific community, considering stochastic stopping time, the…
Safe Policy Improvement (SPI) aims at provable guarantees that a learned policy is at least approximately as good as a given baseline policy. Building on SPI with Soft Baseline Bootstrapping (Soft-SPIBB) by Nadjahi et al., we identify…
We study the computational complexity of approximating general constrained Markov decision processes. Our primary contribution is the design of a polynomial time $(0,\epsilon)$-additive bicriteria approximation algorithm for finding optimal…
In environments with uncertain dynamics exploration is necessary to learn how to perform well. Existing reinforcement learning algorithms provide strong exploration guarantees, but they tend to rely on an ergodicity assumption. The essence…
We consider the problem of computing optimal policies in average-reward Markov decision processes. This classical problem can be formulated as a linear program directly amenable to saddle-point optimization methods, albeit with a number of…
We investigate the problem of best policy identification in discounted linear Markov Decision Processes in the fixed confidence setting under a generative model. We first derive an instance-specific lower bound on the expected number of…
This paper puts forward the concept that learning to take safe actions in unknown environments, even with probability one guarantees, can be achieved without the need for an unbounded number of exploratory trials. This is indeed possible,…
We address the problem of finding an optimal policy in a Markov decision process under a restricted policy class defined by the convex hull of a set of base policies. This problem is of great interest in applications in which a number of…
We develop a stochastic approximation-type algorithm to solve finite state/action, infinite-horizon, risk-aware Markov decision processes. Our algorithm has two loops. The inner loop computes the risk by solving a stochastic saddle-point…
This brief paper presents simple simulation-based algorithms for obtaining an approximately optimal policy in a given finite set in large finite constrained Markov decision processes. The algorithms are adapted from playing strategies for…
We consider controller synthesis for stochastic and partially unknown environments in which safety is essential. Specifically, we abstract the problem as a Markov decision process in which the expected performance is measured using a cost…
Scenario decision making offers a flexible way of making decision in an uncertain environment while obtaining probabilistic guarantees on the risk of failure of the decision. The idea of this approach is to draw samples of the uncertainty…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms have shown tremendous success in simulation environments, but their application to real-world problems faces significant challenges, with safety being a major concern. In particular, enforcing…
In this paper, we study the learning of safe policies in the setting of reinforcement learning problems. This is, we aim to control a Markov Decision Process (MDP) of which we do not know the transition probabilities, but we have access to…
Probabilistic guarantees on the prediction of data-driven classifiers are necessary to define models that can be considered reliable. This is a key requirement for modern machine learning in which the goodness of a system is measured in…
A fundamental challenge in learning to control an unknown dynamical system is to reduce model uncertainty by making measurements while maintaining safety. In this work, we formulate a mathematical definition of what it means to safely learn…
The note studies the problem of selecting a good enough subset out of a finite number of alternatives under a fixed simulation budget. Our work aims to maximize the posterior probability of correctly selecting a good subset. We formulate…
In this paper, we investigate the combination of synthesis, model-based learning, and online sampling techniques to obtain safe and near-optimal schedulers for a preemptible task scheduling problem. Our algorithms can handle Markov decision…
Safe exploration is a key to applying reinforcement learning (RL) in safety-critical systems. Existing safe exploration methods guaranteed safety under the assumption of regularity, and it has been difficult to apply them to large-scale…