Related papers: Action-Conditioned Risk Gating for Safety-Critical…
We consider finite model approximations of discrete-time partially observed Markov decision processes (POMDPs) under the discounted cost criterion. After converting the original partially observed stochastic control problem to a fully…
Goal-conditioned policies, such as those learned via imitation learning, provide an easy way for humans to influence what tasks robots accomplish. However, these robot policies are not guaranteed to execute safely or to succeed when faced…
Modern world models are becoming too complex to admit explicit dynamical descriptions. We study safety-critical contextual control, where a Planner must optimize a task objective using only feasibility samples from a black-box Simulator,…
Autonomous systems often have logical constraints arising, for example, from safety, operational, or regulatory requirements. Such constraints can be expressed using temporal logic specifications. The system state is often partially…
Partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) provide an elegant mathematical framework for modeling complex decision and planning problems in stochastic domains in which states of the system are observable only indirectly, via a…
We study finite memory belief approximation for partially observable (PO) stochastic optimal control (SOC) problems. While belief states are sufficient for SOC in partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs), they are generally…
Balancing safety and efficiency when planning in crowded scenarios with uncertain dynamics is challenging where it is imperative to accomplish the robot's mission without incurring any safety violations. Typically, chance constraints are…
We develop a data-driven approach for runtime safety monitoring in flight testing, where pilots perform maneuvers on aircraft with uncertain parameters. Because safety violations can arise unexpectedly as a result of these uncertainties,…
Designing hierarchical reinforcement learning algorithms that exhibit safe behaviour is not only vital for practical applications but also, facilitates a better understanding of an agent's decisions. We tackle this problem in the options…
Complex dynamical systems rely on the correct deployment and operation of numerous components, with state-of-the-art methods relying on learning-enabled components in various stages of modeling, sensing, and control at both offline and…
In this work we address the problem of finding feasible policies for Constrained Markov Decision Processes under probability one constraints. We argue that stationary policies are not sufficient for solving this problem, and that a rich…
We consider the problem of safe control in discrete autonomous agents that use learned components for imperfect perception (or more generally, state estimation) from high-dimensional observations. We propose a shield construction that…
Autonomous systems that rely on learned perception can make unsafe decisions when sensor readings are misclassified. We study shielding for this setting: given a proposed action, a shield blocks actions that could violate safety. We…
Penetration testing, the simulation of cyberattacks to identify security vulnerabilities, presents a sequential decision-making problem well-suited for reinforcement learning (RL) automation. Like many applications of RL to real-world…
Partially-observable problems pose a trade-off between reducing costs and gathering information. They can be solved optimally by planning in belief space, but that is often prohibitively expensive. Model-predictive control (MPC) takes the…
A central problem of surveillance is to monitor multiple targets moving in a large-scale, obstacle-ridden environment with occlusions. This paper presents a novel principled Partially Observable Markov Decision Process-based approach to…
Vision-guided robotic systems are increasingly deployed in precision alignment tasks that require reliable execution under near-field and off-axis configurations. While recent advances in pose estimation have significantly improved…
Computer-use agents are increasingly capable of operating on real operating systems, but this capability has also increased the risks posed by prompt injection, indirect instructions, and visual attacks. Existing defenses typically rely on…
Attention control is a key cognitive ability for humans to select information relevant to the current task. This paper develops a computational model of attention and an algorithm for attention-based probabilistic planning in Markov…
We propose a novel constrained reinforcement learning method for finding optimal policies in Markov Decision Processes while satisfying temporal logic constraints with a desired probability throughout the learning process. An…