Related papers: Safety-Aware Task Composition for Discrete and Con…
The application of reinforcement learning to safety-critical systems is limited by the lack of formal methods for verifying the robustness and safety of learned policies. This paper introduces a novel framework that addresses this gap by…
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…
Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) frameworks are increasingly used to solve high-dimensional continuous control tasks in robotics. However, due to the lack of sample efficiency, applying DRL for online learning is still practically…
We propose a framework for verifiable and compositional reinforcement learning (RL) in which a collection of RL subsystems, each of which learns to accomplish a separate subtask, are composed to achieve an overall task. The framework…
This paper addresses the problem of maintaining safety during training in Reinforcement Learning (RL), such that the safety constraint violations are bounded at any point during learning. In a variety of RL applications the safety of the…
Many sequential decision-making problems that are currently automated, such as those in manufacturing or recommender systems, operate in an environment where there is either little uncertainty, or zero risk of catastrophe. As companies and…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a foundational approach for enabling intelligent robotic behavior in dynamic and uncertain environments. This work presents an in-depth review of RL principles, advanced deep reinforcement learning…
Safety is a critical feature of controller design for physical systems. When designing control policies, several approaches to guarantee this aspect of autonomy have been proposed, such as robust controllers or control barrier functions.…
We propose a framework that learns to execute natural language instructions in an environment consisting of goal-reaching tasks that share components of their task descriptions. Our approach leverages the compositionality of both value…
We present CompoSuite, an open-source simulated robotic manipulation benchmark for compositional multi-task reinforcement learning (RL). Each CompoSuite task requires a particular robot arm to manipulate one individual object to achieve a…
We study instruction following in multi-task reinforcement learning, where an agent must zero-shot execute novel tasks not seen during training. In this setting, linear temporal logic (LTL) has recently been adopted as a powerful framework…
This paper proposes a safe reinforcement learning (RL) framework based on forward-invariance-induced action-space design. The control problem is cast as a Markov decision process, but instead of relying on runtime shielding or penalty-based…
An important property for lifelong-learning agents is the ability to combine existing skills to solve unseen tasks. In general, however, it is unclear how to compose skills in a principled way. We provide a "recipe" for optimal value…
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,…
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…
Generalization in reinforcement learning (RL) remains a significant challenge, especially when agents encounter novel environments with unseen dynamics. Drawing inspiration from human compositional reasoning -- where known components are…
Recently, safe reinforcement learning (RL) with the actor-critic structure for continuous control tasks has received increasing attention. It is still challenging to learn a near-optimal control policy with safety and convergence…
Navigating fluently around pedestrians is a necessary capability for mobile robots deployed in human environments, such as buildings and homes. While research on social navigation has focused mainly on the scalability with the number of…
Ensuring reliability in modern software systems requires rigorous pre-production testing across highly heterogeneous and evolving environments. Because exhaustive evaluation is infeasible, practitioners must decide how to allocate limited…
Safety is an essential component for deploying reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms in real-world scenarios, and is critical during the learning process itself. A natural first approach toward safe RL is to manually specify constraints on…