Control of Dynamical Systems via Deep Kernel Learning

In the field of Systems and Control, optimal control problem-solving for complex systems is a core task. The development of accurate mathematical models to represent these systems’ dynamics is often difficult. This complexity comes from potential uncertainties, complex non-linearities, or unknown factors that might affect the system. Because of...

What would Jiminy Cricket do?: A pluralist approach in generating and processing morally-aligned text

When making decisions, people are automatically guided by their moral compass. However, AI agents need to be conditioned in order to be steered towards moral behaviour. An environment that can be used to train and test agents is the Jiminy Cricket environment. The Jiminy Cricket environment consists of a set of text-based narrative games, where...

Natural Language Processing and Reinforcement Learning to Generate Morally Aligned Text: Comparing a moral agent to an optimally playing agent

Nowadays Large Language Models are becoming more and more prevalent in today's society. These models act without a sense of morality however. They only prioritize accomplishing their goal. Currently, little research has been done evaluating these models. The current state of the art Reinforcement Learning models represent morality by a singular...

Balancing multidimensional morality and progression: Evaluating the tradeoff for artificial agents playing text-based games

Morality is a fundamental concept that guides humans in the decision-making process. Given the rise of large language models in society, it is necessary to ensure that they adhere to human principles, among which morality is of substantial importance. While research has been done regarding artificial agents behaving morally, current state of the...

Incorporating climate change in I&M planning for engineering structures - A Deep Reinforcement Learning Framework

In the last decades, climate change is causing our environment to change rapidly, unprecedented in recent history. Civil engineering structures are dependent on the deteriorating environment they are situated in. Changes can cause an increase in loading due to, for example, extreme weather events or alter the structure’s resistance by, for...

On the road from Model-Based Dynamical Programming to Model-Free Reinforcement Learning: A sample efficient approach

This thesis introduces a new method, called Mixed Iteration, for controlling Markov Decision Processes when partial information is known about the dynamics of the Markov Decision Process. The algorithm uses sampling to calculate the expectation of partially known dynamics in stochastic environments. Its goal is to lower the number of iterations...

REAL Reinforcement Learning: Planning with adversarial models

Model-Based Reinforcement Learning (MBRL) algorithms solve sequential decision-making problems, usually formalised as Markov Decision Processes, using a model of the environment dynamics to compute the optimal policy. When dealing with complex environments, the environment dynamics are frequently approximated with function approximators (such as...

Music Playlist Generation for Emotion Regulation: A Functional Component in the Individualized Music Intervention for Persons with Dementia

Dementia care is a growing problem, both due to a rising number of cases and due to a shortage in healthcare workers. Aside from cognitive symptoms persons with dementia (PwDs) often deal with psychological symptoms such as agitation. The individualized music intervention (IMI) by Linda Gerdner has been proposed to reduce these. This is the...

Reinforcement Learning for Switching of Semiautomated Vehicles Under Uncomfortable Driving Situations

Over the last two decades, autonomous driving has progressed from science fiction to a real possibility and rapidly developing. However, autonomous driving technology has significant weaknesses and is not safe in unexpected conditions. As a result, automobile manufacturers insist that the driver remains in the driver's seat even while the...

Reinforcement Learning for Switching Control of Semi-automated Vehicles with Driver Fatigue

Automated driving is a rapidly growing technology nowadays. Semi-automated driving is a subpart of automated driving which has multiple driving modes where both driver and automated module can take control. But full safety and comfort guarantees cannot still be given to the drivers. In this project, research has been done to ensure driver safety...

Reinforcement Learning approach for decision-making in driver control shifting for semi-autonomous driving

Semi-autonomous driving innovations aim to bridge the gap to fully autonomous driving by co-operating with human drivers to lead to optimal choices on who should drive in different scenarios by offering different automation levels. However, in the present day, known semi-autonomous driving solutions do not generalise to every complex case of...

Safe Reinforcement Learning Applications

Reinforcement Learning (RL) focuses on maximizing the returns (discounted rewards) throughout the episodes, one of the main challenges when using it is that it is inadequate for safety-critical tasks due to the possibility of transitioning into critical states while exploring. Safe Reinforcement Learning (SafeRL) is a subset of RL that focuses...

Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning for Spatio-temporal Planning

Reinforcement learning (RL) is an area of Machine Learning (ML) concerned with learning how a software-defined agent should act in an environment to maximize the rewards. Similar to many ML methods, RL suffers from the curse of dimensionality, the exponential increase in solution space with the increase in problem dimensions. Learning the...