Related papers: Safety-Constrained Reinforcement Learning with Pos…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has been successfully applied to a variety of robotics applications, where it outperforms classical methods. However, the safety aspect of RL and the transfer to the real world remain an open challenge. A…
A runtime assurance system (RTA) for a given plant enables the exercise of an untrusted or experimental controller while assuring safety with a backup (or safety) controller. The relevant computational design problem is to create a logic…
Autonomous vehicles hold great promise for reducing traffic fatalities and improving transportation efficiency, yet their widespread adoption hinges on embedding credible and transparent ethical reasoning into routine and emergency…
One major obstacle that precludes the success of reinforcement learning in real-world applications is the lack of robustness, either to model uncertainties or external disturbances, of the trained policies. Robustness is critical when the…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising approach. However, success is limited to real-world applications, because ensuring safe exploration and facilitating adequate exploitation is a challenge for controlling robotic systems with…
To provide safety guarantees for learning-based control systems, recent work has developed formal verification methods to apply after training ends. However, if the trained policy does not meet the specifications, or there is conservatism…
Ensuring the safety of reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms is crucial to unlock their potential for many real-world tasks. However, vanilla RL and most safe RL approaches do not guarantee safety. In recent years, several methods have…
Reach-avoid optimal control problems, in which the system must reach certain goal conditions while staying clear of unacceptable failure modes, are central to safety and liveness assurance for autonomous robotic systems, but their exact…
This paper focuses on finding reinforcement learning policies for control systems with hard state and action constraints. Despite its success in many domains, reinforcement learning is challenging to apply to problems with hard constraints,…
Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown promise in addressing complex robotic challenges. In real-world applications, RL is often accompanied by failsafe controllers as a last resort to avoid catastrophic events. While necessary for…
In this work, we study the sample complexity problem of risk-sensitive Reinforcement Learning (RL) with a generative model, where we aim to maximize the Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR) with risk tolerance level $\tau$ at each step, a…
Motivated by the prominence of Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR) as a measure for tail risk in settings affected by uncertainty, we develop a new formula for approximating CVaR based optimization objectives and their gradients from limited…
A classic reachability problem for safety of dynamic systems is to compute the set of initial states from which the state trajectory is guaranteed to stay inside a given constraint set over a given time horizon. In this paper, we leverage…
Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) is hugely successful due to the availability of realistic simulated environments. However, performance degradation during simulation to real-world transfer still remains a challenging problem for the…
This paper proposes a novel safety specification tool, called the distributionally robust risk map (DR-risk map), for a mobile robot operating in a learning-enabled environment. Given the robot's position, the map aims to reliably assess…
In this paper, we study risk-sensitive Reinforcement Learning (RL), focusing on the objective of Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR) with risk tolerance $\tau$. Starting with multi-arm bandits (MABs), we show the minimax CVaR regret rate is…
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…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms show amazing performance in recent years, but placing RL in real-world applications such as self-driven vehicles may suffer safety problems. A self-driven vehicle moving to a target position following…
Safety in goal directed Reinforcement Learning (RL) settings has typically been handled through constraints over trajectories and have demonstrated good performance in primarily short horizon tasks. In this paper, we are specifically…
Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms can achieve state-of-the-art performance in decision-making and continuous control tasks. However, applying RL algorithms on safety-critical systems still needs to be well justified due to the…