Related papers: Criticality and Safety Margins for Reinforcement L…
Any autonomous controller will be unsafe in some situations. The ability to quantitatively identify when these unsafe situations are about to occur is crucial for drawing timely human oversight in, e.g., freight transportation applications.…
The increasing adoption of Reinforcement Learning in safety-critical systems domains such as autonomous vehicles, health, and aviation raises the need for ensuring their safety. Existing safety mechanisms such as adversarial training,…
Physical systems experience nonlinear disturbances which have the potential to disrupt desired behavior. For a particular disturbance, whether or not the system recovers from the disturbance to a desired stable equilibrium point depends on…
Designing hierarchical reinforcement learning algorithms that exhibit safe behaviour is not only vital for practical applications but also, facilitates a better understanding of an agent's decisions. We tackle this problem in the options…
Recent advances in learning techniques have garnered attention for their applicability to a diverse range of real-world sequential decision-making problems. Yet, many practical applications have critical constraints for operation in real…
This paper outlines a methodological approach for designing adaptive agents driving themselves near points of criticality. Using a synthetic approach we construct a conceptual model that, instead of specifying mechanistic requirements to…
This paper proposes a suite of rationality measures and associated theory for reinforcement learning agents, a property increasingly critical yet rarely explored. We define an action in deployment to be perfectly rational if it maximises…
Although Reinforcement Learning (RL) is effective for sequential decision-making problems under uncertainty, it still fails to thrive in real-world systems where risk or safety is a binding constraint. In this paper, we formulate the RL…
This paper investigates the critical-time criteria as a security metric for controlled systems subject to sharp input anomalies (attack, fault), characterized by having high impact in a reduced amount of time (e.g. denial-of-service, attack…
In safety-critical applications, autonomous agents may need to learn in an environment where mistakes can be very costly. In such settings, the agent needs to behave safely not only after but also while learning. To achieve this, existing…
Agentic systems are evaluated on benchmarks where agents interact with environments to solve tasks. Most papers report a pass@1 score computed from a single run per task, assuming this gives a reliable performance estimate. We test this…
Safe navigation in real-time is challenging because engineers need to work with uncertain vehicle dynamics, variable external disturbances, and imperfect controllers. A common safety strategy is to inflate obstacles by hand-defined margins.…
Credible safety plans for advanced AI development require methods to verify agent behavior and detect potential control deficiencies early. A fundamental aspect is ensuring agents adhere to safety-critical principles, especially when these…
Asynchronous Advantage Actor Critic (A3C) is an effective Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithm for a wide range of tasks, such as Atari games and robot control. The agent learns policies and value function through trial-and-error…
This paper addresses the problem of maintaining safety during training in Reinforcement Learning (RL), such that the safety constraint violations are bounded at any point during learning. In a variety of RL applications the safety of the…
This paper proposes a reversible learning framework to improve the robustness and efficiency of value based Reinforcement Learning agents, addressing vulnerability to value overestimation and instability in partially irreversible…
Intelligent systems are increasingly integral to our daily lives, yet rare safety-critical events present significant latent threats to their practical deployment. Addressing this challenge hinges on accurately predicting the probability of…
Safety evaluation for advanced AI systems assumes that behavior observed under evaluation predicts behavior in deployment. This assumption weakens for agents with situational awareness, which may exploit regime leakage, cues distinguishing…
Ensuring safety in autonomous driving requires precise, real-time risk assessment and adaptive behavior. Prior work on risk estimation either outputs coarse, global scene-level metrics lacking interpretability, proposes indicators without…
In reinforcement learning for partially observable environments, many successful algorithms have been developed within the asymmetric learning paradigm. This paradigm leverages additional state information available at training time for…