Related papers: A Pontryagin Perspective on Reinforcement Learning
Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms suffer from the dependency on accurately engineered reward functions to properly guide the learning agents to do the required tasks. Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) addresses that by…
Reinforcement learning has been established over the past decade as an effective tool to find optimal control policies for dynamical systems, with recent focus on approaches that guarantee safety during the learning and/or execution phases.…
Reinforcement learning suffers from limitations in real practices primarily due to the number of required interactions with virtual environments. It results in a challenging problem because we are implausible to obtain a local optimal…
This paper presents a model-based reinforcement learning (RL) framework for optimal closed-loop control of nonlinear robotic systems. The proposed approach learns linear lifted dynamics through Koopman operator theory and integrates the…
In many practical control applications, the performance level of a closed-loop system degrades over time due to the change of plant characteristics. Thus, there is a strong need for redesigning a controller without going through the system…
Reinforcement learning has been successfully used to solve difficult tasks in complex unknown environments. However, these methods typically do not provide any safety guarantees during the learning process. This is particularly problematic,…
Model-based reinforcement learning is an effective approach for controlling an unknown system. It is based on a longstanding pipeline familiar to the control community in which one performs experiments on the environment to collect a…
We study the problem of building an efficient learning system. Efficient learning processes information in the least time, i.e., building a system that reaches a desired error threshold with the least number of observations. Building upon…
The framework of reinforcement learning or optimal control provides a mathematical formalization of intelligent decision making that is powerful and broadly applicable. While the general form of the reinforcement learning problem enables…
Model-free reinforcement learning based methods such as Proximal Policy Optimization, or Q-learning typically require thousands of interactions with the environment to approximate the optimum controller which may not always be feasible in…
We consider the problem of reinforcement learning when provided with (1) a baseline control policy and (2) a set of constraints that the learner must satisfy. The baseline policy can arise from demonstration data or a teacher agent and may…
Reinforcement learning has emerged as a promising methodology for training robot controllers. However, most results have been limited to simulation due to the need for a large number of samples and the lack of automated-yet-safe data…
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…
Safe reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn policies that satisfy certain constraints before deploying them to safety-critical applications. Previous primal-dual style approaches suffer from instability issues and lack optimality…
In recent years, deep reinforcement learning has emerged as a technique to solve closed-loop flow control problems. Employing simulation-based environments in reinforcement learning enables a priori end-to-end optimization of the control…
Reinforcement learning has shown promise in learning policies that can solve complex problems. However, manually specifying a good reward function can be difficult, especially for intricate tasks. Inverse reinforcement learning offers a…
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…
This paper proposes a novel robust reinforcement learning framework for discrete-time linear systems with model mismatch that may arise from the sim-to-real gap. A key strategy is to invoke advanced techniques from control theory. Using the…
We provide a framework for incorporating robustness -- to perturbations in the transition dynamics which we refer to as model misspecification -- into continuous control Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms. We specifically focus on…
A data-efficient learning-based control design method is proposed in this paper. It is based on learning a system dynamics model that is then leveraged in a two-level procedure. On the higher level, a simple but powerful optimization…