60 accepted papers
This document presents the outcomes of the Dagstuhl Seminar "Roadmap for Responsible Robotics," held in September 2023 at the Leibniz Centre for Informatics, Schloss Dagstuhl, Germany. The seminar brought together researchers from Robotics, Computer Science, Social and Cognitive Sciences, and Philos…
Large language models (LLMs) can translate natural language instructions into executable action plans for robotics, autonomous driving, and other domains. Yet, deploying LLM-driven planning in the physical world demands strict adherence to safety and regulatory constraints, which current models ofte…
Multimodal encoders like CLIP excel in tasks such as zero-shot image classification and cross-modal retrieval. However, they require excessive training data. We propose canonical similarity analysis (CSA), which uses two unimodal encoders to replicate multimodal encoders using limited data. CSA maps…
Cooperative bargaining games are widely used to model resource allocation and conflict resolution. Traditional solutions assume the mediator can access agents’ utility function values and gradients. However, there is an increasing number of settings, such as human-AI interactions, where utility valu…
A central challenge in transfer learning is designing algorithms that can quickly adapt and generalize to new tasks without retraining. Yet, the conditions of when and how algorithms can effectively transfer to new tasks is poorly characterized. We introduce a geometric characterization of transfer…
Multi-environment POMDPs (ME-POMDPs) extend standard POMDPs with discrete model uncertainty. ME-POMDPs represent a finite set of POMDPs that share the same state, action, and observation spaces, but may arbitrarily vary in their transition, observation, and reward models. Such models arise, for inst…
Modern robotic systems frequently engage in complex multi-agent interactions, many of which are inherently multi-modal, i.e., they can lead to multiple distinct outcomes. To interact effectively, robots must recognize the possible interaction modes and adapt to the one preferred by other agents. In
Offline model-based reinforcement learning (RL) offers a principled approach to using a learned dynamics model as a simulator to optimize a control policy. Despite the near-optimal performance of existing approaches on benchmarks with high-quality datasets, most struggle on datasets with low state-…
Curriculum learning aims to accelerate reinforcement learning (RL) by generating curricula, i.e., sequences of tasks of increasing difficulty. Although existing curriculum generation approaches provide benefits in sample efficiency, they overlook safety-critical settings where an RL agent must adhe…
Ensuring that AI systems make strategic decisions aligned with the specified preferences in adversarial sequential interactions is a critical challenge for developing trustworthy AI systems, especially when the environment is stochastic and players' incomplete preferences leave some outcomes unranke…
Multimodal foundation models offer promising advancements for enhancing driving perception systems, but their high computational and financial costs pose challenges. We develop a method that leverages foundation models to refine predictions from existing driving perception modelssuch as enhancing ob
Many decision-making tasks, where both accuracy and efficiency matter, still require human supervision. For example, tasks like traffic officers reviewing hour-long dashcam footage or researchers screening conference videos can benefit from concise summaries that reduce cognitive load and save time.…
We propose and demonstrate a compositional framework for training and verifying reinforcement learning (RL) systems within a multifidelity sim-to-real pipeline, in order to deploy reliable and adaptable RL policies on physical hardware. By decomposing complex robotic tasks into component subtasks an…
Recent progress in deep reinforcement learning (RL) and computer vision enables artificial agents to solve complex tasks, including locomotion, manipulation, and video games from high-dimensional pixel observations. However, RL usually relies on domain-specific reward functions for sufficient learni…
Developing autonomous agents that can strategize and cooperate with humans under information asymmetry is challenging without effective communication in natural language. We introduce a shared-control game, where two players collectively control a token in alternating turns to achieve a common objec…
Simultaneous localization and mapping is essential for position tracking and scene understanding. 3D Gaussian-based map representations enable photorealistic reconstruction and real-time rendering of scenes using multiple posed cameras. We show for the first time that using 3D Gaussians for map repr…
We address the problem of sparse selection of visual features for localizing a team of robots navigating in an unknown environment, where robots can exchange relative position measurements with neighbors. We select a set of the most informative features by anticipating their importance in robots loc…
Although reinforcement learning (RL) can solve many challenging sequential decision making problems, achieving *zero-shot* transfer across related tasks remains a challenge. The difficulty lies in finding a good representation for the current task so that the agent understands how it relates to prev…
Autonomous systems often encounter environments and scenarios beyond the scope of their training data, which underscores a critical challenge: the need to generalize and adapt to unseen scenarios in real time. This challenge necessitates new mathematical and algorithmic tools that enable adaptation…
Near the limits of adhesion, the forces generated by a tire are nonlinear and intricately coupled. Efficient and accurate modelling in this region could improve safety, especially in emergency situations where high forces are required. To this end, we propose a novel family of tire force models base…
Privacy-aware multiagent systems must protect agents’ sensitive data while simultaneously ensuring that agents accomplish their shared objectives. Towards this goal, we propose a framework to privatize inter-agent communications in cooperative multiagent decision-making problems. We study sequential…
We present a framework and algorithms to learn controlled dynamics models using neural stochastic differential equations (SDEs)---SDEs whose drift and diffusion terms are both parametrized by neural networks. We construct the drift term to leverage a priori physics knowledge as inductive bias, and w…
We consider the problem of explaining the temporal behavior of black-box systems using human-interpretable models. Following recent research trends, we rely on the fundamental yet interpretable models of deterministic finite automata (DFAs) and linear temporal logic (LTL_f) formulas. In contrast to…
Offline reinforcement learning (offline RL) considers problems where learning is performed using only previously collected samples and is helpful for the settings in which collecting new data is costly or risky. In model-based offline RL, the learner performs estimation (or optimization) using a mod…
Self-paced reinforcement learning (RL) aims to improve the data efficiency of learning by automatically creating sequences, namely curricula, of probability distributions over contexts. However, existing techniques for self-paced RL fail in long-horizon planning tasks that involve temporally extende…
Automated curriculum generation for reinforcement learning (RL) aims to speed up learning by designing a sequence of tasks of increasing difficulty. Such tasks are usually drawn from probability distributions with exponentially bounded tails, such as uniform or Gaussian distributions. However, exist…
Safe exploration is a common problem in reinforcement learning (RL) that aims to prevent agents from making disastrous decisions while exploring their environment. A family of approaches to this problem assume domain knowledge in the form of a (partial) model of this environment to decide upon the s…
Efficient compression of correlated data is essential to minimize communication overload in multi-sensor networks. In such networks, each sensor independently compresses the data and transmits them to a central node. A decoder at the central node decompresses and passes the data to a pre-trained mac…
Transformers have made remarkable progress towards modeling long-range dependencies within the medical image analysis domain. However, current transformer-based models suffer from several disadvantages: (1) existing methods fail to capture the important features of the images due to the naive tokeni…
We study the design of autonomous agents that are capable of deceiving outside observers about their intentions while carrying out tasks in stochastic, complex environments. By modeling the agent's behavior as a Markov decision process, we consider a setting where the agent aims to reach one of mult…
We propose \texttt{FedGLOMO}, a novel federated learning (FL) algorithm with an iteration complexity of $\mathcal{O}(\epsilon^{-1.5})$ to converge to an $\epsilon$-stationary point (i.e., $\mathbb{E}[\|\nabla f(x)\|^2] \leq \epsilon$) for smooth non-convex functions – under arbitrary client heteroge…
Geometric median (GM) is a classical method in statistics for achieving robust estimation of the uncorrupted data; under gross corruption, it achieves the optimal breakdown point of 1/2. However, its computational complexity makes it infeasible for robustifying stochastic gradient descent (SGD) in h…
Neural ordinary differential equations (NODEs) -- parametrizations of differential equations using neural networks -- have shown tremendous promise in learning models of unknown continuous-time dynamical systems from data. However, every forward evaluation of a NODE requires numerical integration of…
Machine teaching is an algorithmic framework for teaching a target hypothesis via a sequence of examples or demonstrations. We investigate machine teaching for temporal logic formulas—a novel and expressive hypothesis class amenable to time-related task specifications. In the context of teaching tem…
We study a class of reinforcement learning tasks in which the agent receives its reward for complex, temporally-extended behaviors sparsely. For such tasks, the problem is how to augment the state-space so as to make the reward function Markovian in an efficient way. While some existing solutions as…
It has recently been shown that if feedback effects of decisions are ignored, then imposing fairness constraints such as demographic parity or equality of opportunity can actually exacerbate unfairness. We propose to address this challenge by modeling feedback effects as Markov decision processes (M…
We study the problem of decentralized classification conducted over a network of mobile sensors. We model the multiagent classification task as a hypothesis testing problem where each sensor has to almost surely find the true hypothesis from a finite set of candidate hypotheses. Each sensor makes no…
This paper presents a self-supervised Learning from Learned Hallucination (LfLH) method to learn fast and reactive motion planners for ground and aerial robots to navigate through highly constrained environments. The recent Learning from Hallucination (LfH) paradigm for autonomous navigation execute…
In a variety of problems, a decision-maker is unaware of the loss function associated with a task, yet it has to minimize this unknown loss in order to accomplish the task. Furthermore, the decision-maker’s task may evolve, resulting in a varying loss function. In this setting, we explore sequential…
We study the problem of securely communicating a sequence of information bits with a client in the presence of multiple adversaries at unknown locations in the environment. We assume that the client and the adversaries are located in the far-field region, and all possible directions for each adversa…
Uncertain partially observable Markov decision processes (uPOMDPs) allow the probabilistic transition and observation functions of standard POMDPs to belong to a so-called uncertainty set. Such uncertainty, referred to as epistemic uncertainty, captures uncountable sets of probability distributions…
We study planning problems where a controllable agent operates under partial observability and interacts with an uncontrollable opponent; also referred to as the adversary. The agent has two distinct objectives: To maximize an expected value and to adhere to a safety specification. Multi-objective p…
We introduce Self-supervised Online Reward Shaping (SORS), which aims to improve the sample efficiency of any RL algorithm in sparse-reward environments by automatically densifying rewards. The proposed framework alternates between classification-based reward inference and policy update steps—the or…
We consider the problem of minimizing a smooth, Lipschitz, convex function over a compact, convex set using sub-zeroth-order oracles: an oracle that outputs the sign of the directional derivative for a given point and a given direction, an oracle that compares the function values for a given pair of…
In continuing tasks, average-reward reinforcement learning may be a more appropriate problem formulation than the more common discounted reward formulation. As usual, learning an optimal policy in this setting typically requires a large amount of training experiences. Reward shaping is a common appr…
We consider the problem of optimal reactive synthesis - compute a strategy that satisfies a mission specification in a dynamic environment, and optimizes a given performance metric. We incorporate task-critical information, that is only available at runtime, into the strategy synthesis in order to i…
As the number of agents comprising a swarm increases, individual-agent-based control techniques for collective task completion become computationally intractable. We study a setting in which the agents move along the nodes of a graph, and the high-level task specifications for the swarm are expresse…
We study the problem of policy synthesis for uncertain partially observable Markov decision processes (uPOMDPs). The transition probability function of uPOMDPs is only known to belong to a so-called uncertainty set, for instance in the form of probability intervals. Such a model arises when, for e…
We consider an agent that is assigned with a temporal logic task in an environment whose semantic representation is only partially known. We represent the semantics of the environment with a set of state properties, called \emph{atomic propositions} over which, the agent holds a probabilistic belief…
Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) have emerged as an effective representation of control policies in sequential decision-making problems. However, a major drawback in the application of RNN-based policies is the difficulty in providing formal guarantees on the satisfaction of behavioral specificatio…
Designing robot controllers that correctly react to changes in the environment is a time-consuming and error-prone process. An alternative is to use “correct-by-construction” synthesis approaches to automatically generate controller designs from high-level specifications. In particular, Generalized…
We study the problem of selecting most informative subset of a large observation set to enable accurate estimation of unknown parameters. This problem arises in a variety of settings in machine learning and signal processing including feature selection, phase retrieval, and target localization. Sinc…
With the primary objective of human-robot interaction being to support humans' goals, there exists a need to formally synthesize robot controllers that can provide the desired service. Synthesis techniques have the benefit of providing formal guarantees for specification satisfaction. There is poten…
We study a safe reinforcement learning problem in which the constraints are defined as the expected cost over finite-length trajectories. We propose a constrained cross-entropy-based method to solve this problem. The method explicitly tracks its performance with respect to constraint satisfaction an…
Automated techniques such as model checking have been used to verify models of robotic mission plans based on Markov decision processes (MDPs) and generate counterexamples that may help diagnose requirement violations. However, such artifacts may be too complex for humans to understand, because exis…
Classification techniques are useful for processing complex signals into labels with semantic value. For example, they can be used to interpret brain signals generated by humans corresponding to a finite set of commands for a physical device. The classifier, however, may interpret the signal as a co…
Advances in automation have the potential to reduce the workload required for human planning and execution of missions carried out by robotic systems such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). However, automation can also result in an increase in system complexity and a corresponding decrease in syste…
This paper considers robot motion planning under temporal logic constraints in probabilistic maps obtained by semantic simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). The uncertainty in a map distribution presents a great challenge for obtaining correctness guarantees with respect to the linear tempor
We consider a problem on the synthesis of optimal reactive controllers with an a priori unknown performance criterion while satisfying a given temporal logic specification through the interaction with an uncontrolled environment. We decouple the problem into two sub-problems. First, we extract a (ma…
For systems in which control authority is shared by an autonomous controller and a human operator, it is important to find solutions that achieve a desirable system performance with a reasonable workload for the human operator. We formulate a shared autonomy system capable of capturing the interacti…