Related papers: Automata Learning meets Shielding
This paper addresses the problem of maintaining safety during training in Reinforcement Learning (RL), such that the safety constraint violations are bounded at any point during learning. In a variety of RL applications the safety of the…
We address the problem of deploying a reinforcement learning (RL) agent on a physical system such as a datacenter cooling unit or robot, where critical constraints must never be violated. We show how to exploit the typically smooth dynamics…
Reinforcement learning (RL) involves performing exploratory actions in an unknown system. This can place a learning agent in dangerous and potentially catastrophic system states. Current approaches for tackling safe learning in RL…
Safe and optimal controller synthesis for switched-controlled hybrid systems, which combine differential equations and discrete changes of the system's state, is known to be intricately hard. Reinforcement learning has been leveraged to…
Designing reliable decision strategies for autonomous urban driving is challenging. Reinforcement learning (RL) has been used to automatically derive suitable behavior in uncertain environments, but it does not provide any guarantee on the…
Safety is a major concern in reinforcement learning (RL): we aim at developing RL systems that not only perform optimally, but are also safe to deploy by providing formal guarantees about their safety. To this end, we introduce…
Safe and efficient autonomous driving maneuvers in an interactive and complex environment can be considerably challenging due to the unpredictable actions of other surrounding agents that may be cooperative or adversarial in their…
Understanding emerging behaviors of reinforcement learning (RL) agents may be difficult since such agents are often trained in complex environments using highly complex decision making procedures. This has given rise to a variety of…
This paper presents the concept of an adaptive safe padding that forces Reinforcement Learning (RL) to synthesise optimal control policies while ensuring safety during the learning process. Policies are synthesised to satisfy a goal,…
Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have been around for decades and employed to solve various sequential decision-making problems. These algorithms however have faced great challenges when dealing with high-dimensional environments. The…
Recent years have seen a rise in interest in terms of using machine learning, particularly reinforcement learning (RL), for production scheduling problems of varying degrees of complexity. The general approach is to break down the…
Safe navigation is essential for autonomous systems operating in hazardous environments. Traditional planning methods excel at long-horizon tasks but rely on a predefined graph with fixed distance metrics. In contrast, safe Reinforcement…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is ubiquitous in the development of modern AI systems. However, state-of-the-art RL agents require extensive, and potentially unsafe, interactions with their environments to learn effectively. These limitations…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is a classical tool to solve network control or policy optimization problems in unknown environments. The original Q-learning suffers from performance and complexity challenges across very large networks. Herein,…
In offline reinforcement learning (RL), we learn policies from fixed datasets without environment interaction. The major challenges are to provide guarantees on the (1) performance and (2) safety of the resulting policy. A technique called…
Robust reinforcement learning (RRL) aims at seeking a robust policy to optimize the worst case performance over an uncertainty set of Markov decision processes (MDPs). This set contains some perturbed MDPs from a nominal MDP (N-MDP) that…
In many real-world reinforcement learning (RL) problems, besides optimizing the main objective function, an agent must concurrently avoid violating a number of constraints. In particular, besides optimizing performance it is crucial to…
In this paper, we use concepts from supervisory control theory of discrete event systems to propose a method to learn optimal control policies for a finite-state Markov Decision Process (MDP) in which (only) certain sequences of actions are…
Reinforcement learning (RL) agents with pre-specified reward functions cannot provide guaranteed safety across variety of circumstances that an uncertain system might encounter. To guarantee performance while assuring satisfaction of safety…
A shield is attached to a system to guarantee safety by correcting the system's behavior at runtime. Existing methods that employ design-time synthesis of shields do not scale to multi-agent systems. Moreover, such shields are typically…