Related papers: Probabilistic Counterexample Guidance for Safer Re…
Many reinforcement learning exploration techniques are overly optimistic and try to explore every state. Such exploration is impossible in environments with the unlimited number of states. I propose to use simulated exploration with an…
Reinforcement learning (RL) with sparse and deceptive rewards is challenging because non-zero rewards are rarely obtained. Hence, the gradient calculated by the agent can be stochastic and without valid information. Recent studies that…
Vanilla Reinforcement Learning (RL) can efficiently solve complex tasks but does not provide any guarantees on system behavior. To bridge this gap, we propose a three-step safe RL procedure for continuous action spaces that provides…
Given the availability of more comprehensive measurement data in modern power systems, reinforcement learning (RL) has gained significant interest in operation and control. Conventional RL relies on trial-and-error interactions with the…
Reinforcement learning with sparse rewards is still an open challenge. Classic methods rely on getting feedback via extrinsic rewards to train the agent, and in situations where this occurs very rarely the agent learns slowly or cannot…
Exploration is an essential component of reinforcement learning algorithms, where agents need to learn how to predict and control unknown and often stochastic environments. Reinforcement learning agents depend crucially on exploration to…
In the context of safe exploration, Reinforcement Learning (RL) has long grappled with the challenges of balancing the tradeoff between maximizing rewards and minimizing safety violations, particularly in complex environments with…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has demonstrated state-of-the-art results in a number of autonomous system applications, however many of the underlying algorithms rely on black-box predictions. This results in poor explainability of the…
Meta reinforcement learning (RL) allows agents to leverage experience across a distribution of tasks on which the agent can train at will, enabling faster learning of optimal policies on new test tasks. Despite its success in improving…
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…
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.…
Random exploration is one of the main mechanisms through which reinforcement learning (RL) finds well-performing policies. However, it can lead to undesirable or catastrophic outcomes when learning online in safety-critical environments. In…
Balancing exploration and exploitation is a fundamental part of reinforcement learning, yet most state-of-the-art algorithms use a naive exploration protocol like $\epsilon$-greedy. This contributes to the problem of high sample complexity,…
A precondition for the deployment of a Reinforcement Learning agent to a real-world system is to provide guarantees on the learning process. While a learning algorithm will eventually converge to a good policy, there are no guarantees on…
This paper targets the efficient construction of a safety shield for decision making in scenarios that incorporate uncertainty. Markov decision processes (MDPs) are prominent models to capture such planning problems. Reinforcement learning…
In many real-world applications of reinforcement learning (RL), performing actions requires consuming certain types of resources that are non-replenishable in each episode. Typical applications include robotic control with limited energy…
In real-life scenarios, a Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent aiming to maximise their reward, must often also behave in a safe manner, including at training time. Thus, much attention in recent years has been given to Safe RL, where an agent…
Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) often leverage Reinforcement Learning (RL) techniques to adapt dynamically to changing environments and optimize performance. However, it is challenging to construct safety cases for RL components. We therefore…
Given a set of trajectories demonstrating the execution of a task safely in a constrained MDP with observable rewards but with unknown constraints and non-observable costs, we aim to find a policy that maximizes the likelihood of…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has revolutionized decision-making across a wide range of domains over the past few decades. Yet, deploying RL policies in real-world scenarios presents the crucial challenge of ensuring safety. Traditional safe…