Related papers: SafeAdapt: Provably Safe Policy Updates in Deep Re…
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,…
Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been explored and verified to be effective in solving decision-making tasks in various domains, such as robotics, transportation, recommender systems, etc. It learns from the interaction with…
A reinforcement learning (RL) control policy could fail in a new/perturbed environment that is different from the training environment, due to the presence of dynamic variations. For controlling systems with continuous state and action…
In this paper, we consider the problem of learning safe policies for probabilistic-constrained reinforcement learning (RL). Specifically, a safe policy or controller is one that, with high probability, maintains the trajectory of the agent…
In many real-world reinforcement learning (RL) problems, besides optimizing the main objective function, an agent must concurrently avoid violating a number of constraints. In particular, besides optimizing performance it is crucial to…
Reinforcement learning (RL) can be highly effective at learning goal-reaching policies, but it typically does not provide formal guarantees that the goal will always be reached. A common approach to provide formal goal-reaching guarantees…
The interest in using reinforcement learning (RL) controllers in safety-critical applications such as robot navigation around pedestrians motivates the development of additional safety mechanisms. Running RL-enabled systems among uncertain…
Traditional controllers have limitations as they rely on prior knowledge about the physics of the problem, require modeling of dynamics, and struggle to adapt to abnormal situations. Deep reinforcement learning has the potential to address…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved remarkable success in various robotic tasks; however, its deployment in real-world scenarios, particularly in contact-rich environments, often overlooks critical safety and stability aspects.…
Model-based reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising tool for developing controllers for real world systems (e.g., robotics, autonomous driving, etc.). However, real systems often have constraints imposed on their state space…
Real-world autonomous decision-making systems, from robots to recommendation engines, must operate in environments that change over time. While deep reinforcement learning (RL) has shown an impressive ability to learn optimal policies in…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful framework for optimal decision-making and control but often lacks provable guarantees for safety-critical applications. In this paper, we introduce a novel recovery-based shielding framework that…
The large-scale integration of intermittent renewable energy resources introduces increased uncertainty and volatility to the supply side of power systems, thereby complicating system operation and control. Recently, data-driven approaches,…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown a promising performance in learning optimal policies for a variety of sequential decision-making tasks. However, in many real-world RL problems, besides optimizing the main objectives, the agent is…
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,…
This dissertation investigates how reinforcement learning (RL) methods can be designed to be safe, sample-efficient, and robust. Framed through the unifying perspective of contextual-bandit RL, the work addresses two major application…
We present Revel, a partially neural reinforcement learning (RL) framework for provably safe exploration in continuous state and action spaces. A key challenge for provably safe deep RL is that repeatedly verifying neural networks within a…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has proven its worth in a series of artificial domains, and is beginning to show some successes in real-world scenarios. However, much of the research advances in RL are hard to leverage in real-world systems due…
Safety is a primary concern when applying reinforcement learning to real-world control tasks, especially in the presence of external disturbances. However, existing safe reinforcement learning algorithms rarely account for external…
Safe reinforcement learning (Safe RL) refers to a class of techniques that aim to prevent RL algorithms from violating constraints in the process of decision-making and exploration during trial and error. In this paper, a novel model-free…