Related papers: Reinforcement Learning for Risk Adaptation via Dif…
Safe reinforcement learning (RL) with assured satisfaction of hard state constraints during training has recently received a lot of attention. Safety filters, e.g., based on control barrier functions (CBFs), provide a promising way for safe…
Autonomous navigation of Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USV) in marine environments with current flows is challenging, and few prior works have addressed the sensorbased navigation problem in such environments under no prior knowledge of the…
This paper presents a model-free reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm to solve the risk-averse optimal control (RAOC) problem for discrete-time nonlinear systems. While successful RL algorithms have been presented to learn optimal control…
Human-driven vehicles (HVs) exhibit complex and diverse behaviors. Accurately modeling such behavior is crucial for validating Robot Vehicles (RVs) in simulation and realizing the potential of mixed traffic control. However, existing…
This paper examines reinforcement learning (RL) in infinite-horizon decision processes with almost-sure safety constraints, crucial for applications like autonomous systems, finance, and resource management. We propose a doubly-regularized…
In safety-critical applications of reinforcement learning such as healthcare and robotics, it is often desirable to optimize risk-sensitive objectives that account for tail outcomes rather than expected reward. We prove the first regret…
Reinforcement learning (RL) agents need to be robust to variations in safety-critical environments. While system identification methods provide a way to infer the variation from online experience, they can fail in settings where fast…
We investigate the feasibility of deploying reinforcement learning (RL) policies for constrained crowd navigation using a low-fidelity simulator. We introduce a representation of the dynamic environment, separating human and obstacle…
Cloud computing has emerged as a crucial solution for managing data- and compute-intensive workflows, offering scalability to address dynamic demands. However, security concerns persist, especially for workflows involving sensitive data and…
Distance-based reward mechanisms in deep reinforcement learning (DRL) navigation systems suffer from critical safety limitations in dynamic environments, frequently resulting in collisions when visibility is restricted. We propose DRL-NSUO,…
In many real-world applications, safety constraints for reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are either unknown or not explicitly defined. We propose a framework that concurrently learns safety constraints and optimal RL policies in such…
Reinforcement learning (RL) excels in various applications but struggles in dynamic environments where the underlying Markov decision process evolves. Continual reinforcement learning (CRL) enables RL agents to continually learn and adapt…
Online reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are often difficult to deploy in complex human-facing applications as they may learn slowly and have poor early performance. To address this, we introduce a practical algorithm for incorporating…
When robots handle navigation tasks while avoiding collisions, they perform in crowded and complex environments not as good as in stable and homogeneous environments. This often results in a low success rate and poor efficiency. Therefore,…
This paper studies continuous-time risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RL) under the entropy-regularized, exploratory diffusion process formulation with the exponential-form objective. The risk-sensitive objective arises either as the…
Optimizing charging protocols is critical for reducing battery charging time and decelerating battery degradation in applications such as electric vehicles. Recently, reinforcement learning (RL) methods have been adopted for such purposes.…
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…
Reinforcement learning (RL) shows great potential for optimizing multi-vehicle cooperative driving strategies through the state-action-reward feedback loop, but it still faces challenges such as low sample efficiency. This paper proposes a…
Safe navigation is essential for autonomous systems operating in hazardous environments. Traditional planning methods excel at long-horizon tasks but rely on a predefined graph with fixed distance metrics. In contrast, safe Reinforcement…
Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR) is a widely used risk-sensitive objective for learning under rare but high-impact losses, yet its statistical behavior under heavy-tailed data remains poorly understood. Unlike expectation-based risk, CVaR…