Related papers: Safety Guarantees in Zero-Shot Reinforcement Learn…
This work considers the problem of transfer learning in the context of reinforcement learning. Specifically, we consider training a policy in a reduced order system and deploying it in the full state system. The motivation for this training…
A fundamental challenge in learning to control an unknown dynamical system is to reduce model uncertainty by making measurements while maintaining safety. In this work, we formulate a mathematical definition of what it means to safely learn…
Safety in reinforcement learning (RL) is a key property in both training and execution in many domains such as autonomous driving or finance. In this paper, we formalize it with a constrained RL formulation in the distributional RL setting.…
A fundamental challenge in learning an unknown dynamical system is to reduce model uncertainty by making measurements while maintaining safety. We formulate a mathematical definition of what it means to safely learn a dynamical system by…
Modern reinforcement learning (RL) systems capture deep truths about general, human problem-solving. In domains where new data can be simulated cheaply, these systems uncover sequential decision-making policies that far exceed the ability…
Approaches to keeping a dynamical system within state constraints typically rely on a model-based safety condition to limit the control signals. In the face of significant modeling uncertainty, the system can suffer from important…
Safety is one of the biggest concerns to applying reinforcement learning (RL) to the physical world. In its core part, it is challenging to ensure RL agents persistently satisfy a hard state constraint without white-box or black-box…
Achieving both optimality and safety under unknown system dynamics is a central challenge in real-world deployment of agents. To address this, we introduce a notion of maximum safe dynamics learning, where sufficient exploration is…
Safety is a critical feature of controller design for physical systems. When designing control policies, several approaches to guarantee this aspect of autonomy have been proposed, such as robust controllers or control barrier functions.…
In many reinforcement learning (RL) applications, we want policies that reach desired states and then keep the controlled system within an acceptable region around the desired states over an indefinite period of time. This latter objective…
Reinforcement learning is a powerful paradigm for learning optimal policies from experimental data. However, to find optimal policies, most reinforcement learning algorithms explore all possible actions, which may be harmful for real-world…
Guaranteeing safe behavior on complex autonomous systems -- from cars to walking robots -- is challenging due to the inherently high dimensional nature of these systems and the corresponding complex models that may be difficult to determine…
Zero-shot reinforcement learning (RL) promises to provide agents that can perform any task in an environment after an offline, reward-free pre-training phase. Methods leveraging successor measures and successor features have shown strong…
The transfer of reinforcement learning (RL) techniques into real-world applications is challenged by safety requirements in the presence of physical limitations. Most RL methods, in particular the most popular algorithms, do not support…
This paper proposes a safe reinforcement learning (RL) framework based on forward-invariance-induced action-space design. The control problem is cast as a Markov decision process, but instead of relying on runtime shielding or penalty-based…
Offline safe reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn policies from a fixed dataset while maximizing performance under cumulative cost constraints. In practice, deployment requirements often vary across scenarios, necessitating a single…
For all its successes, Reinforcement Learning (RL) still struggles to deliver formal guarantees on the closed-loop behavior of the learned policy. Among other things, guaranteeing the safety of RL with respect to safety-critical systems is…
Safely exploring an unknown dynamical system is critical to the deployment of reinforcement learning (RL) in physical systems where failures may have catastrophic consequences. In scenarios where one knows little about the dynamics, diverse…
Stability guarantees are crucial when ensuring a fully autonomous robot does not take undesirable or potentially harmful actions. Unfortunately, global stability guarantees are hard to provide in dynamical systems learned from data,…
Ensuring safety is a crucial challenge when deploying reinforcement learning (RL) to real-world systems. We develop confidence-based safety filters, a control-theoretic approach for certifying state safety constraints for nominal policies…