Scott Niekum: Scaling Probabilistically Safe Learning to Robotics

In recent years, high-confidence reinforcement learning algorithms have enjoyed success in application areas with high-quality models and plentiful data, but robotics remains a challenging domain for scaling up such approaches. Furthermore, very little work has been done on the even more difficult problem of safe imitation learning, in which the demonstrator's reward function is not known. This talk focuses on three recent developments in this emerging area of research: (1) a theory of safe imitation learning; (2) scalable reward inference in the absence of models; (3) efficient off-policy policy evaluation. The proposed algorithms offer a blend of safety and practicality, making a significant step towards safe robot learning with modest amounts of real-world data.