Related papers: Incentivizing Safer Actions in Policy Optimization…
We present a proximal policy optimization (PPO) agent trained through curriculum learning (CL) principles and meticulous reward engineering to optimize a real-world high-throughput waste sorting facility. Our work addresses the challenge of…
The field of risk-constrained reinforcement learning (RCRL) has been developed to effectively reduce the likelihood of worst-case scenarios by explicitly handling risk-measure-based constraints. However, the nonlinearity of risk measures…
In reinforcement learning (RL), different reward functions can define the same optimal policy but result in drastically different learning performance. For some, the agent gets stuck with a suboptimal behavior, and for others, it solves the…
Safe reinforcement learning (RL) studies problems where an intelligent agent has to not only maximize reward but also avoid exploring unsafe areas. In this study, we propose CUP, a novel policy optimization method based on Constrained…
Ensuring safety is a critical challenge in applying Reinforcement Learning (RL) to real-world scenarios. Constrained Reinforcement Learning (CRL) addresses this by maximizing returns under predefined constraints, typically formulated as the…
Proximal policy optimization (PPO) is one of the most successful deep reinforcement-learning methods, achieving state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of challenging tasks. However, its optimization behavior is still far from…
Contrastive reinforcement learning (CRL) learns goal-conditioned Q-values through a contrastive objective over state-action and goal representations, removing the need for hand-crafted reward functions. Despite impressive success in…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising tool to solve robust optimal well control problems where the model parameters are highly uncertain, and the system is partially observable in practice. However, RL of robust control policies often…
Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) aims to recover the reward function of an expert agent from demonstrations of behavior. It is well-known that the IRL problem is fundamentally ill-posed, i.e., many reward functions can explain the…
Safe reinforcement learning (RL) is crucial for deploying RL agents in real-world applications, as it aims to maximize long-term rewards while satisfying safety constraints. However, safe RL often suffers from sample inefficiency, requiring…
Legged locomotion in unstructured environments demands not only high-performance control policies but also formal guarantees to ensure robustness under perturbations. Control methods often require carefully designed reference trajectories,…
Dynamic real-time optimization (DRTO) is a challenging task due to the fact that optimal operating conditions must be computed in real time. The main bottleneck in the industrial application of DRTO is the presence of uncertainty. Many…
In this paper, we study a novel episodic risk-sensitive Reinforcement Learning (RL) problem, named Iterated CVaR RL, which aims to maximize the tail of the reward-to-go at each step, and focuses on tightly controlling the risk of getting…
State-of-the-art reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms typically use random sampling (e.g., $\epsilon$-greedy) for exploration, but this method fails on hard exploration tasks like Montezuma's Revenge. To address the challenge of…
This thesis develops theoretical frameworks and algorithms that advance constrained reinforcement learning (RL) across control, preference learning, and alignment of large language models. The first contribution addresses constrained Markov…
This paper presents a framework to tackle constrained combinatorial optimization problems using deep Reinforcement Learning (RL). To this end, we extend the Neural Combinatorial Optimization (NCO) theory in order to deal with constraints in…
Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has become a central post-training paradigm for improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models. Yet existing methods share a common blind spot: they optimize policies…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents in the real world must satisfy safety constraints in addition to maximizing a reward objective. Model-based RL algorithms hold promise for reducing unsafe real-world actions: they may synthesize policies…
Recently, there has been a surge in interest in safe and robust techniques within reinforcement learning (RL). Current notions of risk in RL fail to capture the potential for systemic failures such as abrupt stoppages from system failures…
Safety remains a central obstacle preventing widespread use of RL in the real world: learning new tasks in uncertain environments requires extensive exploration, but safety requires limiting exploration. We propose Recovery RL, an algorithm…