Related papers: System III: Learning with Domain Knowledge for Saf…
This paper puts forward the concept that learning to take safe actions in unknown environments, even with probability one guarantees, can be achieved without the need for an unbounded number of exploratory trials. This is indeed possible,…
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…
Safe navigation is essential for autonomous systems operating in hazardous environments. Traditional planning methods excel at long-horizon tasks but rely on a predefined graph with fixed distance metrics. In contrast, safe Reinforcement…
In this paper, we study the learning of safe policies in the setting of reinforcement learning problems. This is, we aim to control a Markov Decision Process (MDP) of which we do not know the transition probabilities, but we have access to…
In many real world applications of machine learning, models have to meet certain domain-based requirements that can be expressed as constraints (e.g., safety-critical constraints in autonomous driving systems). Such constraints are often…
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…
Sampling-based motion planning is a well-established approach in autonomous driving, valued for its modularity and analytical tractability. In complex urban scenarios, however, uniform or heuristic sampling often produces many infeasible or…
Offline safe reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising approach for learning safe behaviors without engaging in risky online interactions with the environment. Most existing methods in offline safe RL rely on cost constraints…
Reinforcement learning (RL) in the real world necessitates the development of procedures that enable agents to explore without causing harm to themselves or others. The most successful solutions to the problem of safe RL leverage offline…
This dissertation investigates how reinforcement learning (RL) methods can be designed to be safe, sample-efficient, and robust. Framed through the unifying perspective of contextual-bandit RL, the work addresses two major application…
Recent developments in digital platforms have highlighted the prevalence of open systems, where agents can arrive and depart over time. While bandit learning in open systems has recently received initial attention, existing work imposes…
Perception components in autonomous systems are often developed and optimized independently of downstream decision-making and control components, relying on established performance metrics like accuracy, precision, and recall. Traditional…
We assume that we are given a time series of data from a dynamical system and our task is to learn the flow map of the dynamical system. We present a collection of results on how to enforce constraints coming from the dynamical system in…
We study the challenging exploration incentive problem in both bandit and reinforcement learning, where the rewards are scale-free and potentially unbounded, driven by real-world scenarios and differing from existing work. Past works in…
Achieving efficient and scalable exploration in complex domains poses a major challenge in reinforcement learning. While Bayesian and PAC-MDP approaches to the exploration problem offer strong formal guarantees, they are often impractical…
The primary goal of reinforcement learning is to develop decision-making policies that prioritize optimal performance, frequently without considering safety. In contrast, safe reinforcement learning seeks to reduce or avoid unsafe behavior.…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) for control has become increasingly popular due to its ability to learn rich feedback policies that take into account uncertainty and complex representations of the environment. When considering safety…
This work studies semantic segmentation using 3D LiDAR data. Popular deep learning methods applied for this task require a large number of manual annotations to train the parameters. We propose a new method that makes full use of the…
Human adaptability relies crucially on learning and merging knowledge from both supervised and unsupervised tasks: the parents point out few important concepts, but then the children fill in the gaps on their own. This is particularly…
Lifelong reinforcement learning provides a promising framework for developing versatile agents that can accumulate knowledge over a lifetime of experience and rapidly learn new tasks by building upon prior knowledge. However, current…