Related papers: From Raw Data to Safety: Reducing Conservatism by …
Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) have been demonstrated to be a powerful tool for safety-critical controller design for nonlinear systems. Existing design paradigms do not address the gap between theory (controller design with continuous…
Safety filters based on control barrier functions (CBFs) have become a popular method to guarantee safety for uncertified control policies, e.g., as resulting from reinforcement learning. Here, safety is defined as staying in a pre-defined…
This paper presents an ellipsoidal set-theoretic framework for robust safety filter synthesis in constrained linear systems subject to additive bounded disturbances and input constraints. We formulate the safety filter design as a convex…
This paper addresses the challenge of integrating explicit hard constraints into the control barrier function (CBF) framework for ensuring safety in autonomous systems, including robots. We propose a novel data-driven method to derive CBFs…
Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms can achieve state-of-the-art performance in decision-making and continuous control tasks. However, applying RL algorithms on safety-critical systems still needs to be well justified due to the…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has made notable success in decision-making fields like autonomous driving and robotic manipulation. Yet, its reliance on real-time feedback poses challenges in costly or hazardous settings. Furthermore, RL's…
Machine learning (ML) systems are increasingly deployed in high-stakes domains where reliability is paramount. This thesis investigates how uncertainty estimation can enhance the safety and trustworthiness of ML, focusing on selective…
Safe exploration is a key to applying reinforcement learning (RL) in safety-critical systems. Existing safe exploration methods guaranteed safety under the assumption of regularity, and it has been difficult to apply them to large-scale…
Designing biological sequences with desired properties is challenging due to vast search spaces and limited evaluation budgets. Although reinforcement learning methods use proxy models for rapid reward evaluation, insufficient training data…
Ensuring safety of nonlinear systems under model uncertainty and external disturbances is crucial, especially for real-world control tasks. Predictive methods such as robust model predictive control (RMPC) require solving nonconvex…
As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in high-stakes settings, the risk of generating harmful or toxic content remains a central challenge. Post-hoc alignment methods are brittle: once unsafe patterns are learned during…
In this paper, we provide a direct data-driven approach to synthesize safety controllers for unknown linear systems affected by unknown-but-bounded disturbances, in which identifying the unknown model is not required. First, we propose a…
Data-driven evolutionary algorithms usually aim to exploit the information behind a limited amount of data to perform optimization, which have proved to be successful in solving many complex real-world optimization problems. However, most…
Reinforcement learning (RL) in the real world necessitates the development of procedures that enable agents to explore without causing harm to themselves or others. The most successful solutions to the problem of safe RL leverage offline…
Many real-world sequential decision-making problems involve critical systems with financial risks and human-life risks. While several works in the past have proposed methods that are safe for deployment, they assume that the underlying…
We propose a computationally efficient approach to safe reinforcement learning (RL) for frequency regulation in power systems with high levels of variable renewable energy resources. The approach draws on set-theoretic control techniques to…
Predictive safety filters enable the integration of potentially unsafe learning-based control approaches and humans into safety-critical systems. In addition to simple constraint satisfaction, many control problems involve additional…
While off-policy temporal difference (TD) methods have widely been used in reinforcement learning due to their efficiency and simple implementation, their Bayesian counterparts have not been utilized as frequently. One reason is that the…
There is growing concern over the safety of powerful diffusion models (DMs), as they are often misused to produce inappropriate, not-safe-for-work (NSFW) content or generate copyrighted material or data of individuals who wish to be…
In real-world applications, we often require reliable decision making under dynamics uncertainties using noisy high-dimensional sensory data. Recently, we have seen an increasing number of learning-based control algorithms developed to…