Related papers: Optimizing Industrial HVAC Systems with Hierarchic…
Connector insertion and many other tasks commonly found in modern manufacturing settings involve complex contact dynamics and friction. Since it is difficult to capture related physical effects with first-order modeling, traditional control…
Flexibility design problems are a class of problems that appear in strategic decision-making across industries, where the objective is to design a ($e.g.$, manufacturing) network that affords flexibility and adaptivity. The underlying…
A major challenge for deep reinforcement learning (DRL) agents is to collaborate with novel partners that were not encountered by them during the training phase. This is specifically worsened by an increased variance in action responses…
Recent challenges in operating power networks arise from increasing energy demands and unpredictable renewable sources like wind and solar. While reinforcement learning (RL) shows promise in managing these networks, through topological…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising tool to solve robust optimal well control problems where the model parameters are highly uncertain, and the system is partially observable in practice. However, RL of robust control policies often…
Hierarchical policies enable strong performance in many sequential decision-making problems, such as those with high-dimensional action spaces, those requiring long-horizon planning, and settings with sparse rewards. However, learning…
Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) promises to solve long-horizon Reinforcement Learning (RL) tasks more efficiently than non-hierarchical counterparts by discovering and reusing temporally-extended skills. However, obtaining skills…
We consider the problem of optimal control of district cooling energy plants (DCEPs) consisting of multiple chillers, a cooling tower, and a thermal energy storage (TES), in the presence of time-varying electricity price. A straightforward…
Skills learned through (deep) reinforcement learning often generalizes poorly across domains and re-training is necessary when presented with a new task. We present a framework that combines techniques in \textit{formal methods} with…
Optimizing HVAC (Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning) can enhance a building's energy efficiency while providing comfort levels for its occupants. Using conventional control systems to maintain HVAC functions is often difficult…
Robotic insertion tasks are characterized by contact and friction mechanics, making them challenging for conventional feedback control methods due to unmodeled physical effects. Reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising approach for…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has proven highly effective at enhancing the complex reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), yet underlying mechanisms driving this success remain largely opaque. Our analysis reveals that puzzling…
The optimal placement of sensors for environmental monitoring and disaster management is a challenging problem due to its NP-hard nature. Traditional methods for sensor placement involve exact, approximation, or heuristic approaches, with…
The optimal control of a water reservoir systems represents a challenging problem, due to uncertain hydrologic inputs and the need to adapt to changing environment and varying control objectives. In this work, we propose a real-time…
We study the problem of representation learning in goal-conditioned hierarchical reinforcement learning. In such hierarchical structures, a higher-level controller solves tasks by iteratively communicating goals which a lower-level policy…
The power grid is a complex and vital system that necessitates careful reliability management. Managing the grid is a difficult problem with multiple time scales of decision making and stochastic behavior due to renewable energy…
Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) holds great potential for sample-efficient learning on challenging long-horizon tasks. In particular, letting a higher level assign subgoals to a lower level has been shown to enable fast learning…
In many practical control applications, the performance level of a closed-loop system degrades over time due to the change of plant characteristics. Thus, there is a strong need for redesigning a controller without going through the system…
Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has become a popular method for solving control problems in power systems. Conventional DRL encourages the agent to explore various policies encoded in a neural network (NN) with the goal of maximizing the…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is a flexible and efficient method for programming micro-robots in complex environments. Here we investigate whether reinforcement learning can provide insights into biological systems when trained to perform…