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The widescale deployment of Autonomous Vehicles (AV) seems to be imminent despite many safety challenges that are yet to be resolved. It is well known that there are no universally agreed Verification and Validation (VV) methodologies to…

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…

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) is a practical, scalable way to improve large language models on math, code, and other structured tasks. However, we argue that many headline RLVR gains are not yet well validated…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has become an increasingly important research area as the success of machine learning algorithms and methods grows. To combat the safety concerns surrounding the freedom given to RL agents while training, there…

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has been an effective approach for improving Large Language Models' reasoning in domains such as coding and mathematics. Here, we apply RLVR methods towards forecasting future real-world…

Drawing a random sample of ballots to conduct a risk-limiting audit generally requires knowing how the ballots cast in an election are organized into groups, for instance, how many containers of ballots there are in all and how many ballots…

Tabulation audits for an election provide statistical evidence that a reported contest outcome is "correct" (meaning that the tabulation of votes was properly performed), or else the tabulation audit determines the correct outcome. Stark…

Robust reinforcement learning (RL) aims to find a policy that optimizes the worst-case performance in the face of uncertainties. In this paper, we focus on action robust RL with the probabilistic policy execution uncertainty, in which,…

Batch reinforcement learning (RL) is important to apply RL algorithms to many high stakes tasks. Doing batch RL in a way that yields a reliable new policy in large domains is challenging: a new decision policy may visit states and actions…

We study efficiency improvements in randomized experiments for estimating a vector of potential outcome means using regression adjustment (RA) when there are more than two treatment levels. We show that linear RA which estimates separate…

Risk-limiting post-election audits limit the chance of certifying an electoral outcome if the outcome is not what a full hand count would show. Building on previous work, we report on pilot risk-limiting audits in four elections during 2008…

Can one estimate the number of remaining faults in a software system? A credible estimation technique would be immensely useful to project managers as well as customers. It would also be of theoretical interest, as a general law of software…

We study risk-sensitive Reinforcement Learning (RL), where we aim to maximize the Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR) with a fixed risk tolerance $\tau$. Prior theoretical work studying risk-sensitive RL focuses on the tabular Markov Decision…

Efficiently routing queries to the optimal large language model (LLM) is crucial for optimizing the cost-performance trade-off in multi-model systems. However, most existing routers rely on single-model selection, making them susceptible to…

Representational similarity analysis (RSA) is a multivariate technique to investigate cortical representations of objects or constructs. While avoiding ill-posed matrix inversions that plague multivariate approaches in the presence of many…

Optimistic Rollups (ORUs) significantly enhance blockchain scalability but inherently suffer from the verifier's dilemma, particularly concerning validator attentiveness. Current systems lack mechanisms to proactively ensure validators are…

The largest US banks are required by regulatory mandate to estimate the operational risk capital they must hold using an Advanced Measurement Approach (AMA) as defined by the Basel II/III Accords. Most use the Loss Distribution Approach…

In this work, we address the problem of determining reliable policies in reinforcement learning (RL), with a focus on optimization under uncertainty and the need for performance guarantees. While classical RL algorithms aim at maximizing…

Safety in reinforcement learning (RL) is a key property in both training and execution in many domains such as autonomous driving or finance. In this paper, we formalize it with a constrained RL formulation in the distributional RL setting.…

Vision-language-action models (VLAs) show potential as generalist robot policies. However, these models pose extreme safety challenges during real-world deployment, including the risk of harm to the environment, the robot itself, and…