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Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have been successfully applied to control tasks associated with unmanned aerial vehicles and robotics. In recent years, safe RL has been proposed to allow the safe execution of RL algorithms in…
As reinforcement learning (RL) achieves more success in solving complex tasks, more care is needed to ensure that RL research is reproducible and that algorithms herein can be compared easily and fairly with minimal bias. RL results are,…
Using Reinforcement Learning (RL) in simulation to construct policies useful in real life is challenging. This is often attributed to the sequential decision making aspect: inaccuracies in simulation accumulate over multiple steps, hence…
Reinforcement learning (RL) experiments have notoriously high variance, and minor details can have disproportionately large effects on measured outcomes. This is problematic for creating reproducible research and also serves as an obstacle…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising approach. However, success is limited to real-world applications, because ensuring safe exploration and facilitating adequate exploitation is a challenge for controlling robotic systems with…
Autonomous driving has achieved significant progress in recent years, but autonomous cars are still unable to tackle high-risk situations where a potential accident is likely. In such near-accident scenarios, even a minor change in the…
Reinforcement learning (RL) combines a control problem with statistical estimation: The system dynamics are not known to the agent, but can be learned through experience. A recent line of research casts `RL as inference' and suggests a…
The sequential nature of decision-making in financial asset trading aligns naturally with the reinforcement learning (RL) framework, making RL a common approach in this domain. However, the low signal-to-noise ratio in financial markets…
There are many examples of cases where access to improved models of human behavior and cognition has allowed creation of robots which can better interact with humans, and not least in road vehicle automation this is a rapidly growing area…
Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) aims to recover the reward function of an expert agent from demonstrations of behavior. It is well-known that the IRL problem is fundamentally ill-posed, i.e., many reward functions can explain the…
We transform reinforcement learning (RL) into a form of supervised learning (SL) by turning traditional RL on its head, calling this Upside Down RL (UDRL). Standard RL predicts rewards, while UDRL instead uses rewards as task-defining…
Realistic traffic simulation is crucial for developing self-driving software in a safe and scalable manner prior to real-world deployment. Typically, imitation learning (IL) is used to learn human-like traffic agents directly from…
We provide an original theoretical study of Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) through the lens of reward compatibility, a novel framework to quantify the compatibility of a reward with the given expert's demonstrations. Intuitively, a…
A significant challenge for the practical application of reinforcement learning in the real world is the need to specify an oracle reward function that correctly defines a task. Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) seeks to avoid this…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods have been proven successful in solving manipulation tasks autonomously. However, RL is still not widely adopted on real robotic systems because working with real hardware entails additional challenges,…
The emergence of reinforcement learning (RL) methods in traffic signal control tasks has achieved better performance than conventional rule-based approaches. Most RL approaches require the observation of the environment for the agent to…
In this context, a major focus of this thesis is on unintentional collisions, where a straight goal is to eliminate injury from users and passerby's via realtime sensing and control systems. A less obvious focus is to combine collision…
In order to safely operate around humans, robots can employ predictive models of human motion. Unfortunately, these models cannot capture the full complexity of human behavior and necessarily introduce simplifying assumptions. As a result,…
Reinforcement learning (RL) offers a compelling data-driven paradigm for synthesizing controllers for complex systems when accurate physical models are unavailable; however, most existing control-oriented RL methods assume stationarity and,…
A popular framework for enforcing safe actions in Reinforcement Learning (RL) is Constrained RL, where trajectory based constraints on expected cost (or other cost measures) are employed to enforce safety and more importantly these…