Related papers: Approximate Shielding of Atari Agents for Safe Exp…
Deep reinforcement learning has emerged as a powerful tool for obtaining high-performance policies. However, the safety of these policies has been a long-standing issue. One promising paradigm to guarantee safety is a shield, which shields…
In this paper, we consider the important problem of safe exploration in reinforcement learning. While reinforcement learning is well-suited to domains with complex transition dynamics and high-dimensional state-action spaces, an additional…
Policy search reinforcement learning allows robots to acquire skills by themselves. However, the learning procedure is inherently unsafe as the robot has no a-priori way to predict the consequences of the exploratory actions it takes.…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful framework for optimal decision-making and control but often lacks provable guarantees for safety-critical applications. In this paper, we introduce a novel recovery-based shielding framework that…
Besides the recent impressive results on reinforcement learning (RL), safety is still one of the major research challenges in RL. RL is a machine-learning approach to determine near-optimal policies in Markov decision processes (MDPs). In…
Recent studies have shown that deep reinforcement learning (DRL) policies are vulnerable to adversarial attacks, which raise concerns about applications of DRL to safety-critical systems. In this work, we adopt a principled way and study…
The Arcade Learning Environment (ALE) is a popular platform for evaluating reinforcement learning agents. Much of the appeal comes from the fact that Atari games demonstrate aspects of competency we expect from an intelligent agent and are…
Safety is one of the main challenges in applying reinforcement learning to realistic environmental tasks. To ensure safety during and after training process, existing methods tend to adopt overly conservative policy to avoid unsafe…
Model-based reinforcement learning agents utilizing transformers have shown improved sample efficiency due to their ability to model extended context, resulting in more accurate world models. However, for complex reasoning and planning…
A key challenge in applying reinforcement learning to safety-critical domains is understanding how to balance exploration (needed to attain good performance on the task) with safety (needed to avoid catastrophic failure). Although a growing…
A recent body of work addresses safety constraints in explore-and-exploit systems. Such constraints arise where, for example, exploration is carried out by individuals whose welfare should be balanced with overall welfare. In this paper, we…
Artificial agents' adaptability to novelty and alignment with intended behavior is crucial for their effective deployment. Reinforcement learning (RL) leverages novelty as a means of exploration, yet agents often struggle to handle novel…
We introduce an online active exploration algorithm for data-efficiently learning an abstract symbolic model of an environment. Our algorithm is divided into two parts: the first part quickly generates an intermediate Bayesian symbolic…
Pure exploration (aka active testing) is the fundamental task of sequentially gathering information to answer a query about a stochastic environment. Good algorithms make few mistakes and take few samples. Lower bounds (for multi-armed…
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,…
An effective approach to exploration in reinforcement learning is to rely on an agent's uncertainty over the optimal policy, which can yield near-optimal exploration strategies in tabular settings. However, in non-tabular settings that…
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…
Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) discovers policies that maximize reward but do not have safety guarantees during the learning and deployment phases. Although shielding with Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) is a promising formal method…
Atari games have been a long-standing benchmark in the reinforcement learning (RL) community for the past decade. This benchmark was proposed to test general competency of RL algorithms. Previous work has achieved good average performance…
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…