Related papers: Safe Exploration in Reinforcement Learning: A Gene…

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…

Efficient exploration is a central problem in reinforcement learning and is often formalized as maximizing the entropy of the state-action occupancy measure. While unconstrained maximum-entropy exploration is relatively well understood,…

In online reinforcement learning (RL), efficient exploration remains particularly challenging in high-dimensional environments with sparse rewards. In low-dimensional environments, where tabular parameterization is possible, count-based…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has achieved tremendous success in many complex decision-making tasks. However, safety concerns are raised during deploying RL in real-world applications, leading to a growing demand for safe RL algorithms, such…

A major challenge in deploying reinforcement learning in online tasks is ensuring that safety is maintained throughout the learning process. In this work, we propose CERL, a new method for solving constrained Markov decision processes while…

Exploration-exploitation is a powerful and practical tool in multi-agent learning (MAL), however, its effects are far from understood. To make progress in this direction, we study a smooth analogue of Q-learning. We start by showing that…

In Reinforcement Learning (RL), agents aim at maximizing cumulative rewards in a given environment. During the learning process, RL agents face the dilemma of exploitation and exploration: leveraging existing knowledge to acquire rewards or…

A key aspect of Safe Reinforcement Learning (Safe RL) involves estimating the constraint condition for the next policy, which is crucial for guiding the optimization of safe policy updates. However, the existing Advantage-based Estimation…

We propose Deterministic Sequencing of Exploration and Exploitation (DSEE) algorithm with interleaving exploration and exploitation epochs for model-based RL problems that aim to simultaneously learn the system model, i.e., a Markov…

We address the problem of deploying a reinforcement learning (RL) agent on a physical system such as a datacenter cooling unit or robot, where critical constraints must never be violated. We show how to exploit the typically smooth dynamics…

Recently, reinforcement learning (RL) has been used as a tool for finding failures in autonomous systems. During execution, the RL agents often rely on some domain-specific heuristic reward to guide them towards finding failures, but…

Constrained Reinforcement Learning (CRL) aims to maximize cumulative rewards while satisfying constraints. However, existing CRL algorithms often encounter significant constraint violations during training, limiting their applicability in…

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) that solves constraint-satisfactory policies provides a promising way to the broader safety-critical applications of RL in real-world problems such as robotics. Among all safe RL approaches, model-based…

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) trains a policy to maximize the task reward while satisfying safety constraints. While prior works focus on the performance optimality, we find that the optimal solutions of many safe RL problems are not…

The exploration-exploitation dilemma in reinforcement learning (RL) is a fundamental challenge to efficient RL algorithms. Existing algorithms for finite state and action discounted RL problems address this by assuming sufficient…

Reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated impressive performance in decision-making tasks like embodied control, autonomous driving and financial trading. In many decision-making tasks, the agents often encounter the problem of executing…

One of the remaining challenges in reinforcement learning is to develop agents that can generalise to novel scenarios they might encounter once deployed. This challenge is often framed in a multi-task setting where agents train on a fixed…

Reinforcement learning (RL) has been successfully applied to a variety of robotics applications, where it outperforms classical methods. However, the safety aspect of RL and the transfer to the real world remain an open challenge. A…

This paper studies the constrained/safe reinforcement learning (RL) problem with sparse indicator signals for constraint violations. We propose a model-based approach to enable RL agents to effectively explore the environment with unknown…

Reinforcement learning (RL) is recognized as lacking generalization and robustness under environmental perturbations, which excessively restricts its application for real-world robotics. Prior work claimed that adding regularization to the…