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While reinforcement learning (RL) holds great potential for decision making in the real world, it suffers from a number of unique difficulties which often need specific consideration. In particular: it is highly non-stationary; suffers from…
This paper proposes a new regularization technique for reinforcement learning (RL) towards making policy and value functions smooth and stable. RL is known for the instability of the learning process and the sensitivity of the acquired…
Trainable activation functions, whose parameters are optimized alongside network weights, offer increased expressivity compared to fixed activation functions. Specifically, trainable activation functions defined as ratios of polynomials…
The lack of stability guarantee restricts the practical use of learning-based methods in core control problems in robotics. We develop new methods for learning neural control policies and neural Lyapunov critic functions in the model-free…
When designing controllers for safety-critical systems, practitioners often face a challenging tradeoff between robustness and performance. While robust control methods provide rigorous guarantees on system stability under certain…
Safe reinforcement learning (RL) trains a policy to maximize the task reward while satisfying safety constraints. While prior works focus on the performance optimality, we find that the optimal solutions of many safe RL problems are not…
This paper investigates the problem of designing control policies that satisfy high-level specifications described by signal temporal logic (STL) in unknown, stochastic environments. While many existing works concentrate on optimizing the…
In order for reinforcement learning techniques to be useful in real-world decision making processes, they must be able to produce robust performance from limited data. Deep policy optimization methods have achieved impressive results on…
This paper presents a novel approach to reinforcement learning (RL) for control systems that provides probabilistic stability guarantees using finite data. Leveraging Lyapunov's method, we propose a probabilistic stability theorem that…
The goal of this paper is to present a method for simultaneous trajectory and local stabilizing policy optimization to generate local policies for trajectory-centric model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL). This is motivated by the fact…
Offline reinforcement learning (RL) extends the paradigm of classical RL algorithms to purely learning from static datasets, without interacting with the underlying environment during the learning process. A key challenge of offline RL is…
Despite the numerous advances, reinforcement learning remains away from widespread acceptance for autonomous controller design as compared to classical methods due to lack of ability to effectively tackle the reality gap. The reliance on…
Safe reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn policies that satisfy certain constraints before deploying them to safety-critical applications. Previous primal-dual style approaches suffer from instability issues and lack optimality…
This paper considers the problem of real-time control and learning in dynamic systems subjected to parametric uncertainties. We propose a combination of a Reinforcement Learning (RL) based policy in the outer loop suitably chosen to ensure…
While reinforcement learning (RL) has been central to the recent success of large language models (LLMs), RL optimization is notoriously unstable, especially when compared to supervised fine-tuning (SFT). In this work, we investigate the…
In many reinforcement learning (RL) applications, we want policies that reach desired states and then keep the controlled system within an acceptable region around the desired states over an indefinite period of time. This latter objective…
Deep Reinforcement Learning (Deep RL) has had incredible achievements on high dimensional problems, yet its learning process remains unstable even on the simplest tasks. Deep RL uses neural networks as function approximators. These neural…
This paper investigates a type of instability that is linked to the greedy policy improvement in approximated reinforcement learning. We show empirically that non-deterministic policy improvement can stabilize methods like LSPI by…
Deep Reinforcement Learning (Deep RL) has been receiving increasingly more attention thanks to its encouraging performance on a variety of control tasks. Yet, conventional regularization techniques in training neural networks (e.g., $L_2$…
Recent years have witnessed significant progresses in deep Reinforcement Learning (RL). Empowered with large scale neural networks, carefully designed architectures, novel training algorithms and massively parallel computing devices,…