Related papers: Approximate Shielding of Atari Agents for Safe Exp…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown great potential for solving complex tasks in a variety of domains. However, applying RL to safety-critical systems in the real-world is not easy as many algorithms are sample-inefficient and maximising…
Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) is applied in safety-critical domains such as robotics and autonomous driving. It achieves superhuman abilities in many tasks, however whether DRL agents can be shown to act safely is an open problem. Atari…
Safe exploration is a common problem in reinforcement learning (RL) that aims to prevent agents from making disastrous decisions while exploring their environment. A family of approaches to this problem assume domain knowledge in the form…
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…
The growing trend of fledgling reinforcement learning systems making their way into real-world applications has been accompanied by growing concerns for their safety and robustness. In recent years, a variety of approaches have been put…
Recent rapid developments in reinforcement learning algorithms have been giving us novel possibilities in many fields. However, due to their exploring property, we have to take the risk into consideration when we apply those algorithms to…
Autonomous exploration of cluttered environments requires efficient exploration strategies that guarantee safety against potential collisions with unknown random obstacles. This paper presents a novel approach combining a graph neural…
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…
Reinforcement learning algorithms typically necessitate extensive exploration of the state space to find optimal policies. However, in safety-critical applications, the risks associated with such exploration can lead to catastrophic…
Shielding is a popular technique for achieving safe reinforcement learning (RL). However, classical shielding approaches come with quite restrictive assumptions making them difficult to deploy in complex environments, particularly those…
In high stakes environments, agents relying purely on imitation learning or reinforcement learning often struggle to avoid safety-critical errors during exploration. Existing reinforcement learning approaches for environments such as chess…
Efficient exploration remains a challenging research problem in reinforcement learning, especially when an environment contains large state spaces, deceptive local optima, or sparse rewards. To tackle this problem, we present a…
In safe reinforcement learning, agent needs to balance between exploration actions and safety constraints. Following this paradigm, domain transfer approaches learn a prior Q-function from the related environments to prevent unsafe actions.…
Safe exploration is a key to applying reinforcement learning (RL) in safety-critical systems. Existing safe exploration methods guaranteed safety under the assumption of regularity, and it has been difficult to apply them to large-scale…
Designing hierarchical reinforcement learning algorithms that exhibit safe behaviour is not only vital for practical applications but also, facilitates a better understanding of an agent's decisions. We tackle this problem in the options…
A default assumption in the design of reinforcement-learning algorithms is that a decision-making agent always explores to learn optimal behavior. In sufficiently complex environments that approach the vastness and scale of the real world,…
In this paper, we propose a method to develop trustworthy reinforcement learning systems. To ensure safety especially during exploration, we automatically synthesize a correct-by-construction runtime enforcer, called a shield, that blocks…
In real-life scenarios, a Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent aiming to maximise their reward, must often also behave in a safe manner, including at training time. Thus, much attention in recent years has been given to Safe RL, where an agent…
Safe exploration aims at addressing the limitations of Reinforcement Learning (RL) in safety-critical scenarios, where failures during trial-and-error learning may incur high costs. Several methods exist to incorporate external knowledge or…
The increasing adoption of Reinforcement Learning in safety-critical systems domains such as autonomous vehicles, health, and aviation raises the need for ensuring their safety. Existing safety mechanisms such as adversarial training,…