Related papers: Learning to maintain safety through expert demonst…
Safety is a fundamental requirement for autonomous systems operating in critical domains. Control barrier functions (CBFs) have been used to design safety filters that minimally alter nominal controls for such systems to maintain their…
Deep Neural Network-based systems are now the state-of-the-art in many robotics tasks, but their application in safety-critical domains remains dangerous without formal guarantees on network robustness. Small perturbations to sensor inputs…
Safe and efficient autonomous driving maneuvers in an interactive and complex environment can be considerably challenging due to the unpredictable actions of other surrounding agents that may be cooperative or adversarial in their…
Learning from Demonstration (LfD) is a powerful method for enabling robots to perform novel tasks as it is often more tractable for a non-roboticist end-user to demonstrate the desired skill and for the robot to efficiently learn from the…
The balance between exploration and exploitation is a key problem for reinforcement learning methods, especially for Q-learning. In this paper, a fidelity-based probabilistic Q-learning (FPQL) approach is presented to naturally solve this…
This paper presents a constrained policy gradient algorithm. We introduce constraints for safe learning with the following steps. First, learning is slowed down (lazy learning) so that the episodic policy change can be computed with the…
Ensuring the safety of Reinforcement Learning (RL) is crucial for its deployment in real-world applications. Nevertheless, managing the trade-off between reward and safety during exploration presents a significant challenge. Improving…
Safety and robustness are two desired properties for any reinforcement learning algorithm. CMDPs can handle additional safety constraints and RMDPs can perform well under model uncertainties. In this paper, we propose to unite these two…
Optimizing objective functions subject to constraints is fundamental in many real-world applications. However, these constraints are often not readily defined and must be inferred from expert agent behaviors, a problem known as Inverse…
Satisfying safety constraints is a priority concern when solving optimal control problems (OCPs). Due to the existence of infeasibility phenomenon, where a constraint-satisfying solution cannot be found, it is necessary to identify a…
We study the problem of learning safe control policies that are also effective; i.e., maximizing the probability of satisfying a linear temporal logic (LTL) specification of a task, and the discounted reward capturing the (classic) control…
In recent years, $Q$-learning has become indispensable for model-free reinforcement learning (MFRL). However, it suffers from well-known problems such as under- and overestimation bias of the value, which may adversely affect the policy…
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…
Reinforcement learning is a widely used approach to autonomous navigation, showing potential in various tasks and robotic setups. Still, it often struggles to reach distant goals when safety constraints are imposed (e.g., the wheeled robot…
There have been numerous advances in reinforcement learning, but the typically unconstrained exploration of the learning process prevents the adoption of these methods in many safety critical applications. Recent work in safe reinforcement…
Recent advances in deep reinforcement learning have demonstrated the capability of learning complex control policies from many types of environments. When learning policies for safety-critical applications, it is essential to be sensitive…
Imitation learning seeks to learn an expert policy from sampled demonstrations. However, in the real world, it is often difficult to find a perfect expert and avoiding dangerous behaviors becomes relevant for safety reasons. We present the…
Safe reinforcement learning (RL) trains a policy to maximize the task reward while satisfying safety constraints. While prior works focus on the performance optimality, we find that the optimal solutions of many safe RL problems are not…
The last half-decade has seen a steep rise in the number of contributions on safe learning methods for real-world robotic deployments from both the control and reinforcement learning communities. This article provides a concise but holistic…
Although learning-based methods have great potential for robotics, one concern is that a robot that updates its parameters might cause large amounts of damage before it learns the optimal policy. We formalize the idea of safe learning in a…