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Related papers: Safe Control with Minimal Regret

200 papers

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…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2019-10-09 David Mguni

This paper is concerned with the design of optimal control for finite-dimensional control-affine nonlinear dynamical systems. We introduce an optimal control problem that specifically optimizes nonlinear observability in addition to…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2017-08-03 Atiye Alaeddini , Kristi A. Morgansen , Mehran Mesbahi

This paper investigates the problem of regret minimization in linear time-varying (LTV) dynamical systems. Due to the simultaneous presence of uncertainty and non-stationarity, designing online control algorithms for unknown LTV systems…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-07 Yuzhen Han , Ruben Solozabal , Jing Dong , Xingyu Zhou , Martin Takac , Bin Gu

We consider adaptive control of the Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR), where an unknown linear system is controlled subject to quadratic costs. Leveraging recent developments in the estimation of linear systems and in robust controller…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-05-25 Sarah Dean , Horia Mania , Nikolai Matni , Benjamin Recht , Stephen Tu

The need for fast and robust optimization algorithms are of critical importance in all areas of machine learning. This paper treats the task of designing optimization algorithms as an optimal control problem. Using regret as a metric for an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-21 Philippe Casgrain , Anastasis Kratsios

We consider measurement-feedback control in linear dynamical systems from the perspective of regret minimization. Unlike most prior work in this area, we focus on the problem of designing an online controller which competes with the optimal…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-06-24 Gautam Goel , Babak Hassibi

We present a method for synthesizing controllers to steer trajectories from an initial set to a target set on a finite time horizon. The proposed control synthesis problem is decomposed into two steps. The first step under-approximates the…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2018-10-02 He Yin , Andrew Packard , Murat Arcak , Pete Seiler

In this paper, we propose and analyze a new method for online linear quadratic regulator (LQR) control with a priori unknown time-varying cost matrices. The cost matrices are revealed sequentially with the potential for future values to be…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-02-22 Yitian Chen , Timothy L. Molloy , Tyler Summers , Iman Shames

Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) approaches have shown successful results in solving a large variety of complex, structured, long-horizon problems. Nevertheless, a full theoretical understanding of this empirical evidence is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-05 Gianluca Drappo , Alberto Maria Metelli , Marcello Restelli

In this paper we propose a novel experimental design-based algorithm to minimize regret in online stochastic linear and combinatorial bandits. While existing literature tends to focus on optimism-based algorithms--which have been shown to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-02 Andrew Wagenmaker , Julian Katz-Samuels , Kevin Jamieson

We introduce two new no-regret algorithms for the stochastic shortest path (SSP) problem with a linear MDP that significantly improve over the only existing results of (Vial et al., 2021). Our first algorithm is computationally efficient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-21 Liyu Chen , Rahul Jain , Haipeng Luo

In this paper, online convex optimization is applied to the problem of controlling linear dynamical systems. An algorithm similar to online gradient descent, which can handle time-varying and unknown cost functions, is proposed. Then,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-11-03 Marko Nonhoff , Matthias A. Müller

The paper describes a receding horizon control design framework for continuous-time stochastic nonlinear systems subject to probabilistic state constraints. The intention is to derive solutions that are implementable in real-time on…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2012-11-20 Shridhar K. Shah , Herbert G. Tanner , Chetan D. Pahlajani

This paper studies the safe reinforcement learning problem formulated as an episodic finite-horizon tabular constrained Markov decision process with an unknown transition kernel and stochastic reward and cost functions. We propose a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-15 Kihyun Yu , Duksang Lee , William Overman , Dabeen Lee

We consider the problem of controlling a possibly unknown linear dynamical system with adversarial perturbations, adversarially chosen convex loss functions, and partially observed states, known as non-stochastic control. We introduce a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-26 Max Simchowitz , Karan Singh , Elad Hazan

This paper presents a new model-based algorithm that computes predictive optimal controls on-line and in closed loop for traditionally challenging nonlinear systems. Examples demonstrate the same algorithm controlling hybrid impulsive,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2017-09-04 Alex Ansari , Todd Murphey

Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR) and Linear Quadratic Gaussian (LQG) control are foundational and extensively researched problems in optimal control. We investigate LQR and LQG problems with semi-adversarial perturbations and time-varying…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-26 Y. Jennifer Sun , Stephen Newman , Elad Hazan

This paper proposes a modular approach that combines the online convex optimization framework and reference governors to solve a constrained control problem featuring time-varying and a priori unknown cost functions. Compared to existing…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-07-14 Marko Nonhoff , Johannes Köhler , Matthias A. Müller

We derive a novel asymptotic problem-dependent lower-bound for regret minimization in finite-horizon tabular Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). While, similar to prior work (e.g., for ergodic MDPs), the lower-bound is the solution to an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-25 Andrea Tirinzoni , Matteo Pirotta , Alessandro Lazaric

This paper addresses the problem of finite horizon constrained robust optimal control for nonlinear systems subject to norm-bounded disturbances. To this end, the underlying uncertain nonlinear system is decomposed based on a first-order…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-08-01 Antoine P. Leeman , Johannes Köhler , Andrea Zanelli , Samir Bennani , Melanie N. Zeilinger