Related papers: Approximate Shielding of Atari Agents for Safe Exp…

Shielding is widely used to enforce safety in reinforcement learning (RL), ensuring that an agent's actions remain compliant with formal specifications. Classical shielding approaches, however, are often static, in the sense that they…

A major challenge to deploying cyber-physical systems with learning-enabled controllers is to ensure their safety, especially in the face of changing environments that necessitate runtime knowledge acquisition. Model-checking and automated…

In this paper we propose a framework towards achieving two intertwined objectives: (i) equipping reinforcement learning with active exploration and deliberate information gathering, such that it regulates state and parameter uncertainties…

The deployment of autonomous robots in safety-critical applications requires safety guarantees. Provably safe reinforcement learning is an active field of research that aims to provide such guarantees using safeguards. These safeguards…

Autonomous 3D environment exploration is a fundamental task for various applications such as navigation. The goal of exploration is to investigate a new environment and build its occupancy map efficiently. In this paper, we propose a new…

Autonomous agents powered by foundation models have seen widespread adoption across various real-world applications. However, they remain highly vulnerable to malicious instructions and attacks, which can result in severe consequences such…

Reinforcement learning is a promising approach to learning control policies for performing complex multi-agent robotics tasks. However, a policy learned in simulation often fails to guarantee even simple safety properties such as obstacle…

We consider a class of reinforcement-learning systems in which the agent follows a behavior policy to explore a discrete state-action space to find an optimal policy while adhering to some restriction on its behavior. Such restriction may…

Exploration in unknown environments is a fundamental problem in reinforcement learning and control. In this work, we study task-guided exploration and determine what precisely an agent must learn about their environment in order to complete…

We consider online learning problems under a partial observability model capturing situations where the information conveyed to the learner is between full information and bandit feedback. In the simplest variant, we assume that in addition…

Large Language Model (LLM) agents are increasingly being deployed as conversational assistants capable of performing complex real-world tasks through tool integration. This enhanced ability to interact with external systems and process…

It is challenging to use reinforcement learning (RL) in cyber-physical systems due to the lack of safety guarantees during learning. Although there have been various proposals to reduce undesired behaviors during learning, most of these…

Safe learning and optimization deals with learning and optimization problems that avoid, as much as possible, the evaluation of non-safe input points, which are solutions, policies, or strategies that cause an irrecoverable loss (e.g.,…

A runtime assurance system (RTA) for a given plant enables the exercise of an untrusted or experimental controller while assuring safety with a backup (or safety) controller. The relevant computational design problem is to create a logic…

We study the problem of exploration in Reinforcement Learning and present a novel model-free solution. We adopt an information-theoretical viewpoint and start from the instance-specific lower bound of the number of samples that have to be…

The promise of reinforcement learning is to solve complex sequential decision problems autonomously by specifying a high-level reward function only. However, reinforcement learning algorithms struggle when, as is often the case, simple and…

We tackle the problem of learning equilibria in simulation-based games. In such games, the players' utility functions cannot be described analytically, as they are given through a black-box simulator that can be queried to obtain noisy…

This work presents an exploration and imitation-learning-based agent capable of state-of-the-art performance in playing text-based computer games. Text-based computer games describe their world to the player through natural language and…

Active learning methods have shown great promise in reducing the number of samples necessary for learning. As automated learning systems are adopted into real-time, real-world decision-making pipelines, it is increasingly important that…

We study algorithms for average-cost reinforcement learning problems with value function approximation. Our starting point is the recently proposed POLITEX algorithm, a version of policy iteration where the policy produced in each iteration…