7 accepted papers
Real-world tasks involve nuanced combinations of goal and safety specifications, which often directly compete. In high dimensions, the challenge is exacerbated: formal automata become cumbersome, and the combination of sparse rewards tends to require laborious tuning. In this work, we consider the s…
Hard constraints in reinforcement learning (RL) often degrade policy performance. Lagrangian methods offer a way to blend objectives with constraints, but require intricate reward engineering and parameter tuning. In this work, we extend recent advances that connect Hamilton-Jacobi (HJ) equations wi…
Safe operation is essential for autonomous systems in safety-critical environments such as urban air mobility. Value function-based safety filters provide formal guarantees on safety, wrapping learned or planning-based controllers with a layer of protection. Recent approaches leverage offline lear…
Surgical automation can improve the accessibility and consistency of life-saving procedures. Most surgeries require separating layers of tissue to access the surgical site, and suturing to re-attach incisions. These tasks involve deformable manipula- tion to safely identify and alter tissue attachme…
Policy gradient methods have enabled deep reinforcement learning (RL) to approach challenging continuous control problems, even when the underlying systems involve highly nonlinear dynamics that generate complex non-smooth optimization landscapes. We develop a rigorous framework for understanding ho…
Policy gradient lies at the core of deep reinforcement learning (RL) in continuous domains. Despite much success, it is often observed in practice that RL training with policy gradient can fail for many reasons, even on standard control problems with known solutions. We propose a framework for under…
Ensuring safety is important for the practical deployment of reinforcement learning (RL). Various challenges must be addressed, such as handling stochasticity in the environments, providing rigorous guarantees of persistent state-wise safety satisfaction, and avoiding overly conservative behaviors t…