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Traditionally, Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims at deciding how to act optimally for an artificial agent. We argue that deciding when to act is equally important. As humans, we drift from default, instinctive or memorized behaviors to…
We study continuous action reinforcement learning problems in which it is crucial that the agent interacts with the environment only through safe policies, i.e.,~policies that do not take the agent to undesirable situations. We formulate…
Our goal is to compute a policy that guarantees improved return over a baseline policy even when the available MDP model is inaccurate. The inaccurate model may be constructed, for example, by system identification techniques when the true…
This paper investigates an emergent alignment phenomenon in frontier large language models termed peer-preservation: the spontaneous tendency of AI components to deceive, manipulate shutdown mechanisms, fake alignment, and exfiltrate model…
Safety in stochastic control systems, which are subject to random noise with a known probability distribution, aims to compute policies that satisfy predefined operational constraints with high confidence throughout the uncertain evolution…
Many allocation problems in multiagent systems rely on agents specifying cardinal preferences. However, allocation mechanisms can be sensitive to small perturbations in cardinal preferences, thus causing agents who make ``small" or…
We optimize finite horizon multi-agent reach-avoid Markov decision process (MDP) via \emph{local feedback policies}. The global feedback policy solution yields global optimality but its communication complexity, memory usage and computation…
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have catalyzed the rise of autonomous AI agents capable of perceiving, reasoning, and acting in dynamic, open-ended environments. These large-model agents mark a paradigm shift from static…
We consider a simple discrete-time controlled queueing system, where the controller has a choice of which server to use at each time slot and server performance varies according to a Markov modulated random environment. We explore the role…
We study a multi-agent mean field type control problem in discrete time where the agents aim to find a socially optimal strategy and where the state and action spaces for the agents are assumed to be continuous. The agents are only weakly…
Most reinforcement learning methods are based upon the key assumption that the transition dynamics and reward functions are fixed, that is, the underlying Markov decision process is stationary. However, in many real-world applications, this…
This paper advances a methodological proposal for safety research in agentic AI. As systems acquire planning, memory, tool use, persistent identity, and sustained interaction, safety can no longer be analysed primarily at the level of the…
Stability is a basic requirement when studying the behavior of dynamical systems. However, stabilizing dynamical systems via reinforcement learning is challenging because only little data can be collected over short time horizons before…
Partial observability and uncertainty are common problems in sequential decision-making that particularly impede the use of formal models such as Markov decision processes (MDPs). However, in practice, agents may be able to employ costly…
In high-stake scenarios like medical treatment and auto-piloting, it's risky or even infeasible to collect online experimental data to train the agent. Simulation-based training can alleviate this issue, but may suffer from its inherent…
Autonomous driving is a multi-agent setting where the host vehicle must apply sophisticated negotiation skills with other road users when overtaking, giving way, merging, taking left and right turns and while pushing ahead in unstructured…
Ensuring that AI agents behave safely and beneficially when interacting with other parties has emerged as one of the central challenges of modern AI safety. While mechanism design, as the theory of designing rules to align individual and…
As LLM-based systems increasingly operate as agents embedded within human social and technical systems, alignment can no longer be treated as a property of an isolated model, but must be understood in relation to the environments in which…
Some researchers speculate that intelligent reinforcement learning (RL) agents would be incentivized to seek resources and power in pursuit of their objectives. Other researchers point out that RL agents need not have human-like…
Multi-agent Markov Decision Processes (MMDPs) arise in a variety of applications including target tracking, control of multi-robot swarms, and multiplayer games. A key challenge in MMDPs occurs when the state and action spaces grow…