7 accepted papers
Learning from feedback is a common paradigm to acquire information that is hard to specify a priori. In this work, we consider an agent with a known nominal reward model that captures its high-level task objective. Furthermore, the agent operates subject to constraints that are unknown a priori and…
Planning for autonomous operation in unknown environments poses a number of technical challenges. The agent must ensure robustness to unknown phenomena, un-predictable variation in execution, and uncertain resources, all while maximizing its objective. These challenges are ex-acerbated in the contex…
Robots deployed in the real world over extendedperiods of time need to reason about unexpected failures, learn to predict them, and to proactively take actions to avoid future failures. Existing approaches for competence-aware planning are either model-based, requiring explicit enumeration of known
Although experts carefully specify the high-level decision-making models in autonomous systems, it is infeasible to guarantee safety across every scenario during operation. We therefore propose a safety metareasoning system that optimizes the severity of the system's safety concerns and the interfer…
Contemporary planning models and methods often rely on constant availability of free state information at each step of execution. However, autonomous systems are increasingly deployed in the open world where state information may be costly or simply unavailable in certain situations. Failing to acco…
Despite considerable efforts by human designers, accounting for every unique situation that an autonomous robotic system deployed in the real world could face is often an infeasible task. As a result, many such deployed systems still rely on human assistance in various capacities to complete certain…
Autonomous systems often use approximate planners that exploit state abstractions to solve large MDPs in real-time decision-making problems. However, these planners can eliminate details needed to produce effective behavior in autonomous systems. We therefore propose a novel model, a partially abstr…