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Reinforcement learning (RL) agents with pre-specified reward functions cannot provide guaranteed safety across variety of circumstances that an uncertain system might encounter. To guarantee performance while assuring satisfaction of safety…
Reinforcement learning (RL) offers a compelling data-driven paradigm for synthesizing controllers for complex systems when accurate physical models are unavailable; however, most existing control-oriented RL methods assume stationarity and,…
Constrained reinforcement learning (CRL) has gained significant interest recently, since safety constraints satisfaction is critical for real-world problems. However, existing CRL methods constraining discounted cumulative costs generally…
In standard reinforcement learning (RL), a learning agent seeks to optimize the overall reward. However, many key aspects of a desired behavior are more naturally expressed as constraints. For instance, the designer may want to limit the…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated impressive performance in various areas such as video games and robotics. However, ensuring safety and stability, which are two critical properties from a control perspective, remains a…
Barrier functions (also called certificates) have been an important tool for the verification of hybrid systems, and have also played important roles in optimization and multi-objective control. The extension of a barrier function to a…
Optimal control methods provide solutions to safety-critical problems but easily become intractable. Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) have emerged as a popular technique that facilitates their solution by provably guaranteeing safety,…
Safe Reinforcement Learning (Safe RL) aims to train an RL agent to maximize its performance in real-world environments while adhering to safety constraints, as exceeding safety violation limits can result in severe consequences. In this…
Safety is critical when applying reinforcement learning (RL) to real-world problems. As a result, safe RL has emerged as a fundamental and powerful paradigm for optimizing an agent's policy while incorporating notions of safety. A prevalent…
This paper focuses on finding reinforcement learning policies for control systems with hard state and action constraints. Despite its success in many domains, reinforcement learning is challenging to apply to problems with hard constraints,…
Model information can be used to predict future trajectories, so it has huge potential to avoid dangerous region when implementing reinforcement learning (RL) on real-world tasks, like autonomous driving. However, existing studies mostly…
It is quite challenging to ensure the safety of reinforcement learning (RL) agents in an unknown and stochastic environment under hard constraints that require the system state not to reach certain specified unsafe regions. Many popular…
Modern nonlinear control theory seeks to develop feedback controllers that endow systems with properties such as safety and stability. The guarantees ensured by these controllers often rely on accurate estimates of the system state for…
Achieving safe autonomous navigation systems is critical for deploying robots in dynamic and uncertain real-world environments. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical control framework leveraging neural network verification techniques to…
Despite the many recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL), the question of learning policies that robustly satisfy state constraints under unknown disturbances remains open. In this paper, we offer a new perspective on achieving…
Recent advances in Deep Machine Learning have shown promise in solving complex perception and control loops via methods such as reinforcement and imitation learning. However, guaranteeing safety for such learned deep policies has been a…
Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms interact with their environment in a trial-and-error fashion. Such interactions can be expensive, inefficient, and timely when learning on a physical system rather than in a simulation. This work…
Reinforcement learning (RL) based investment strategies have been widely adopted in portfolio management (PM) in recent years. Nevertheless, most RL-based approaches may often emphasize on pursuing returns while ignoring the risks of the…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) of robotic manipulation skills, despite its impressive successes, stands to benefit from incorporating domain knowledge from control theory. One of the most important properties that is of interest is control…
In this paper, we consider the problem of verifying safety constraint satisfaction for single-input single-output systems with uncertain transfer function coefficients. We propose a new type of barrier function based on a vector norm. This…