Related papers: Value Functions are Control Barrier Functions: Ver…
Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) have emerged as a powerful paradigm in control theory, providing a principled approach to enforcing safety-critical constraints in dynamic systems. This survey paper comprehensively explores the foundational…
For all its successes, Reinforcement Learning (RL) still struggles to deliver formal guarantees on the closed-loop behavior of the learned policy. Among other things, guaranteeing the safety of RL with respect to safety-critical systems is…
Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has achieved impressive performance in robotics and autonomous systems (RAS). A key challenge to its deployment in real-life operations is the presence of spuriously unsafe DRL policies. Unexplored states…
Control barrier functions are widely used to enforce safety properties in robot motion planning and control. However, the problem of constructing barrier functions online and synthesizing safe controllers that can deal with the associated…
This paper presents a novel approach to reinforcement learning (RL) for control systems that provides probabilistic stability guarantees using finite data. Leveraging Lyapunov's method, we propose a probabilistic stability theorem that…
Learning-based control with safety guarantees usually requires real-time safety certification and modifications of possibly unsafe learning-based policies. The control barrier function (CBF) method uses a safety filter containing a…
This paper presents a novel framework for analyzing Incremental-Input-to-State Stability ($\delta$ISS) based on the idea of using rewards as "test functions." Whereas control theory traditionally deals with Lyapunov functions that satisfy a…
Ensuring the safety of reinforcement learning (RL) policies in high-stakes environments requires not only formal verification but also interpretability and targeted falsification. While model checking provides formal guarantees, its…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is a general framework for adaptive control, which has proven to be efficient in many domains, e.g., board games, video games or autonomous vehicles. In such problems, an agent faces a sequential decision-making…
While learning-based control techniques often outperform classical controller designs, safety requirements limit the acceptance of such methods in many applications. Recent developments address this issue through so-called predictive safety…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising approach. However, success is limited to real-world applications, because ensuring safe exploration and facilitating adequate exploitation is a challenge for controlling robotic systems with…
As safety violations can lead to severe consequences in real-world robotic applications, the increasing deployment of Reinforcement Learning (RL) in robotic domains has propelled the study of safe exploration for reinforcement learning…
In recent years, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) approaches have generated highly successful controllers for a myriad of complex domains. However, the opaque nature of these models limits their applicability in aerospace systems and…
In this paper, the issue of model uncertainty in safety-critical control is addressed with a data-driven approach. For this purpose, we utilize the structure of an input-ouput linearization controller based on a nominal model along with a…
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has become a key technique for enhancing large language models (LLMs), with verification engineering playing a central role. However, best practices for RL in instruction following…
Control barrier functions are mathematical constructs used to guarantee safety for robotic systems. When integrated as constraints in a quadratic programming optimization problem, instantaneous control synthesis with real-time performance…
In the current control design of safety-critical autonomous systems, formal verification techniques are typically applied after the controller is designed to evaluate whether the required properties (e.g., safety) are satisfied. However,…
Robust control barrier functions (CBFs) provide a principled mechanism for smooth safety enforcement under worst-case disturbances. However, existing approaches typically rely on explicit, closed-form structure in the dynamics (e.g.,…
Safety remains a central obstacle preventing widespread use of RL in the real world: learning new tasks in uncertain environments requires extensive exploration, but safety requires limiting exploration. We propose Recovery RL, an algorithm…
Control barrier functions are a popular method of ensuring system safety, and these functions can be used to enforce invariance of a set under the dynamics of a system. A control barrier function must have certain properties, and one must…