Related papers: Safety Guarantees in Zero-Shot Reinforcement Learn…

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has demonstrated remarkable performance in many continuous control tasks. However, a significant obstacle to the real-world application of DRL is the lack of safety guarantees. Although DRL agents can…

Recent work has shown that, under certain assumptions, zero-shot reinforcement learning (RL) methods can generalise to any unseen task in an environment after reward-free pre-training. Access to Markov states is one such assumption, yet, in…

We develop provably safe and convergent reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms for control of nonlinear dynamical systems, bridging the gap between the hard safety guarantees of control theory and the convergence guarantees of RL theory.…

Stability guarantees are crucial when ensuring that a fully autonomous robot does not take undesirable or potentially harmful actions. We recently proposed the Neural Contractive Dynamical Systems (NCDS), which is a neural network…

Safety guarantees are a prerequisite to the deployment of reinforcement learning (RL) agents in safety-critical tasks. Often, deployment environments exhibit non-stationary dynamics or are subject to changing performance goals, requiring…

In this paper, we study the problem of ensuring safety with a few shots of samples for partially unknown systems. We first characterize a fundamental limit when producing safe actions is not possible due to insufficient information or…

This paper addresses the problem of maintaining safety during training in Reinforcement Learning (RL), such that the safety constraint violations are bounded at any point during learning. In a variety of RL applications the safety of the…

The problem of computing the reachable set for a given system is a quintessential question in nonlinear control theory. While previous work has yielded a plethora of approximate and analytical methods for determining such a set, these…

Reinforcement learning (RL) offers a compelling data-driven paradigm for synthesizing controllers for complex systems when accurate physical models are unavailable; however, most existing control-oriented RL methods assume stationarity and,…

This paper develops an approach to learn a policy of a dynamical system that is guaranteed to be both provably safe and goal-reaching. Here, the safety means that a policy must not drive the state of the system to any unsafe region, while…

Reinforcement learning has been established over the past decade as an effective tool to find optimal control policies for dynamical systems, with recent focus on approaches that guarantee safety during the learning and/or execution phases.…

Reinforcement learning (RL) has had its fair share of success in contact-rich manipulation tasks but it still lags behind in benefiting from advances in robot control theory such as impedance control and stability guarantees. Recently, the…

It is quite challenging to ensure the safety of reinforcement learning (RL) agents in an unknown and stochastic environment under hard constraints that require the system state not to reach certain specified unsafe regions. Many popular…

In real-life scenarios, a Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent aiming to maximise their reward, must often also behave in a safe manner, including at training time. Thus, much attention in recent years has been given to Safe RL, where an agent…

Despite the impressive recent advances in learning-based robot control, ensuring robustness to out-of-distribution conditions remains an open challenge. Safety filters can, in principle, keep arbitrary control policies from incurring…

This paper considers the problem of solving constrained reinforcement learning (RL) problems with anytime guarantees, meaning that the algorithmic solution must yield a constraint-satisfying policy at every iteration of its evolution. Our…

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…

Monotone systems, also known as order-preserving or cooperative systems, are prevalent in models of engineering applications such as transportation and biological networks. In this paper, we investigate the problem of finding a control…

Given a set of trajectories demonstrating the execution of a task safely in a constrained MDP with observable rewards but with unknown constraints and non-observable costs, we aim to find a policy that maximizes the likelihood of…

In offline reinforcement learning (RL), we learn policies from fixed datasets without environment interaction. The major challenges are to provide guarantees on the (1) performance and (2) safety of the resulting policy. A technique called…