Related papers: Reducing Safety Interventions in Provably Safe Rei…
AI systems are increasingly applied to complex tasks that involve interaction with humans. During training, such systems are potentially dangerous, as they haven't yet learned to avoid actions that could cause serious harm. How can an AI…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is increasingly used to personalize instruction in intelligent tutoring systems, yet the field lacks a formal framework for defining and evaluating pedagogical safety. We introduce a four-layer model of…
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…
Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has achieved impressive performance in robotics and autonomous systems (RAS). A key challenge to its deployment in real-life operations is the presence of spuriously unsafe DRL policies. Unexplored states…
Imitation learning (IL) has shown great success in learning complex robot manipulation tasks. However, there remains a need for practical safety methods to justify widespread deployment. In particular, it is important to certify that a…
Real-world reinforcement learning (RL) offers a promising approach to training precise and dexterous robotic manipulation policies in an online manner, enabling robots to learn from their own experience while gradually reducing human labor.…
Reinforcement learning (RL) for robotics is challenging due to the difficulty in hand-engineering a dense cost function, which can lead to unintended behavior, and dynamical uncertainty, which makes exploration and constraint satisfaction…
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) has shown great promise in simulated environments, such as games, where failures have minimal consequences. However, the deployment of RL agents in real-world systems such as autonomous vehicles, robotics, UAVs,…
Although safety stock optimisation has been studied for more than 60 years, most companies still use simplistic means to calculate necessary safety stock levels, partly due to the mismatch between existing analytical methods' emphases on…
An emerging field of sequential decision problems is safe Reinforcement Learning (RL), where the objective is to maximize the reward while obeying safety constraints. Being able to handle constraints is essential for deploying RL agents in…
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) methods for social robot navigation show great success navigating robots through large crowds of people, but the performance of these learning-based methods tends to degrade in particularly challenging or…
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…
Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has achieved groundbreaking successes in a wide variety of robotic applications. A natural consequence is the adoption of this paradigm for safety-critical tasks, where human safety and expensive hardware…
Emerging applications in robotics and autonomous systems, such as autonomous driving and robotic surgery, often involve critical safety constraints that must be satisfied even when information about system models is limited. In this regard,…
Safe Reinforcement Learning (SRL) aims to realize a safe learning process for Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) algorithms by incorporating safety constraints. However, the efficacy of SRL approaches often relies on accurate function…
While Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has achieved remarkable success across various domains, it remains vulnerable to occasional catastrophic failures without additional safeguards. An effective solution to prevent these failures is to…
Safe reinforcement learning is a promising path toward applying reinforcement learning algorithms to real-world problems, where suboptimal behaviors may lead to actual negative consequences. In this work, we focus on the setting where…
Connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) have the potential to enhance driving safety, for example by enabling safe vehicle following and more efficient traffic scheduling. For such future deployments, safety requirements should be…