Related papers: Path-Specific Objectives for Safer Agent Incentive…
Causal models bring many benefits to decision-making systems (or agents) by making them interpretable, sample-efficient, and robust to changes in the input distribution. However, spurious correlations can lead to wrong causal models and…
Reinforcement learning algorithms typically necessitate extensive exploration of the state space to find optimal policies. However, in safety-critical applications, the risks associated with such exploration can lead to catastrophic…
As machine learning models become more capable, they have exhibited increased potential in solving complex tasks. One of the most promising directions uses deep reinforcement learning to train autonomous agents in computer network defense…
Reinforcement Learning agents are expected to eventually perform well. Typically, this takes the form of a guarantee about the asymptotic behavior of an algorithm given some assumptions about the environment. We present an algorithm for a…
In some agent designs like inverse reinforcement learning an agent needs to learn its own reward function. Learning the reward function and optimising for it are typically two different processes, usually performed at different stages. We…
Reinforcement learners can attain high reward through novel unintended strategies. We study a Bayesian mitigation for general environments: we expand the agent's subjective reward range to include a large negative value $-L$, while the true…
Transparency and explainability are important features that responsible autonomous vehicles should possess, particularly when interacting with humans, and causal reasoning offers a strong basis to provide these qualities. However, even if…
I study a principal-agent model in which a principal hires an agent to collect information about an unknown continuous state. The agent acquires a signal whose distribution is centered around the state, controlling the signal's precision at…
Identifying uncertainty and taking mitigating actions is crucial for safe and trustworthy reinforcement learning agents, especially when deployed in high-risk environments. In this paper, risk sensitivity is promoted in a model-based…
We use optimism to introduce generic asymptotically optimal reinforcement learning agents. They achieve, with an arbitrary finite or compact class of environments, asymptotically optimal behavior. Furthermore, in the finite deterministic…
During training, reinforcement learning systems interact with the world without considering the safety of their actions. When deployed into the real world, such systems can be dangerous and cause harm to their surroundings. Often, dangerous…
In the sequential decision making setting, an agent aims to achieve systematic generalization over a large, possibly infinite, set of environments. Such environments are modeled as discrete Markov decision processes with both states and…
We study a security threat to reinforcement learning where an attacker poisons the learning environment to force the agent into executing a target policy chosen by the attacker. As a victim, we consider RL agents whose objective is to find…
We design a simple reinforcement learning (RL) agent that implements an optimistic version of $Q$-learning and establish through regret analysis that this agent can operate with some level of competence in any environment. While we leverage…
The aim of path planning is to reach the goal from starting point by searching for the route of an agent. In the path planning, the routes may vary depending on the number of variables such that it is important for the agent to reach…
Adversarial training aims to defend against adversaries: malicious opponents whose sole aim is to harm predictive performance in any way possible. This presents a rather harsh perspective, which we assert results in unnecessarily…
Reinforcement-learning agents seek to maximize a reward signal through environmental interactions. As humans, our job in the learning process is to design reward functions to express desired behavior and enable the agent to learn such…
Robots deployed in real-world environments should operate safely in a robust manner. In scenarios where an "ego" agent navigates in an environment with multiple other "non-ego" agents, two modes of safety are commonly proposed --…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is an effective approach to motion planning in autonomous driving, where an optimal driving policy can be automatically learned using the interaction data with the environment. Nevertheless, the reward function…
In this paper, we consider a general distributed system with multiple agents who select and then implement actions in the system. The system has an operator with a centralized objective. The agents, on the other hand, are selfinterested and…