Related papers: Progressive Safeguards for Safe and Model-Agnostic…
This paper presents the concept of an adaptive safe padding that forces Reinforcement Learning (RL) to synthesise optimal control policies while ensuring safety during the learning process. Policies are synthesised to satisfy a goal,…
Due to limited resources and public safety concerns, deep reinforcement learning (RL) agents for many cyber-physical systems (e.g., autonomous vehicles) are first trained in simulators. However, when deployed in real world environments,…
While Large Language Models (LLMs) have catalyzed progress in embodied intelligence, a fundamental gap between their inherent probabilistic uncertainty and the strict determinism and verifiable safety required in the physical world. To…
Reinforcement learning agents naturally learn from extensive exploration. Exploration is costly and can be unsafe in $\textit{safety-critical}$ domains. This paper proposes a novel framework for incorporating domain knowledge to help guide…
The success of automated driving deployment is highly depending on the ability to develop an efficient and safe driving policy. The problem is well formulated under the framework of optimal control as a cost optimization problem. Model…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents have great successes in solving tasks with large observation and action spaces from limited feedback. Still, training the agents is data-intensive and there are no guarantees that the learned behavior is…
Safety is a critical concern when deploying reinforcement learning agents for realistic tasks. Recently, safe reinforcement learning algorithms have been developed to optimize the agent's performance while avoiding violations of safety…
Existing approaches to language model alignment often treat safety as a tradeoff against helpfulness, which can lead to unacceptable responses in sensitive domains. To ensure reliable performance in such settings, we propose High-Confidence…
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) empower embodied agents to execute complex instructions, yet they remain vulnerable to contextual safety risks where benign commands become hazardous due to subtle environmental states. Existing safeguards…
In standard reinforcement learning (RL), a learning agent seeks to optimize the overall reward. However, many key aspects of a desired behavior are more naturally expressed as constraints. For instance, the designer may want to limit the…
Ensuring safety via safety filters in real-world robotics presents significant challenges, particularly when the system dynamics is complex or unavailable. To handle this issue, learning-based safety filters recently gained popularity,…
In recent years, safety risks associated with large language models have become increasingly prominent, highlighting the urgent need to mitigate the generation of toxic and harmful content. The mainstream paradigm for LLM safety alignment…
The study of security in machine learning mainly focuses on downstream task-specific attacks, where the adversarial example is obtained by optimizing a loss function specific to the downstream task. At the same time, it has become standard…
Meta-learning algorithms enable rapid adaptation to new tasks with minimal data, a critical capability for real-world robotic systems. This paper evaluates Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML) combined with Trust Region Policy Optimization…
Fine-tuning safety-aligned language models for downstream tasks often leads to substantial degradation of refusal behavior, making models vulnerable to adversarial misuse. While prior work has shown that safety-relevant features are encoded…
We develop a framework for interacting with uncertain environments in reinforcement learning (RL) by leveraging preferences in the form of utility functions. We claim that there is value in considering different risk measures during…
AI safety has emerged as a critical priority as these systems are increasingly deployed in real-world applications. We propose the first domain-agnostic AI safety ensuring framework that achieves strong safety guarantees while preserving…
In this paper, we propose a learning algorithm that enables a model to quickly exploit commonalities among related tasks from an unseen task distribution, before quickly adapting to specific tasks from that same distribution. We investigate…
For machine learning components used as part of autonomous systems (AS) in carrying out critical tasks it is crucial that assurance of the models can be maintained in the face of post-deployment changes (such as changes in the operating…
In numerous reinforcement learning (RL) problems involving safety-critical systems, a key challenge lies in balancing multiple objectives while simultaneously meeting all stringent safety constraints. To tackle this issue, we propose a…