Event
MRC Seminar: From Neural Certificates to Certificate-based RL in Large-Scale Autonomy Design
Friday, October 6, 2023
2:00 p.m.
JMP 2116
From Neural Certificates to Certificate-based RL in Large-Scale Autonomy Design
Chuchu Fan
Assistant Professor
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract
Learning-enabled control systems have demonstrated impressive empirical performance on challenging control problems in robotics, but this performance comes at the cost of reduced transparency and lack of guarantees on the safety or stability of the learned controllers. In recent years, new techniques have emerged to provide these guarantees by learning certificates alongside control policies — these certificates provide concise, data-driven proofs that guarantee the safety and stability of the learned control system. These methods not only allow the user to verify the safety of a learned controller but also provide supervision during training, allowing safety and stability requirements to influence the training process itself. In this talk, we present an overview of this rapidly developing field of certificate learning.
Biography
Dr. Chuchu Fan is an Assistant Professor in AeroAstro and LIDS at MIT. Before that, she was a postdoc researcher at Caltech and got her Ph.D. from ECE at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research group Realm at MIT works on using rigorous mathematics, including formal methods, machine learning, and control theory, for the design, analysis, and verification of safe autonomous systems. Chuchu is the recipient of the 2020 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award, an NSF CAREER Award, and an AFOSR Young Investigator Program (YIP) Award.
Host: Ryan Sochol
