Date: July 11, 2025, 12 pm - 1 pm
This is a hybrid event. To join via Zoom: Meeting ID: 978 2352 7756, Passcode: Enter last year in format YYYY

To join in person: 2004 Lay Auto Lab. Refreshments will be available!

Abstract: Modern deep reinforcement learning (DRL) methods have made significant advances in handling continuous action spaces. However, real-world control systems--especially those requiring precise and reliable performance--often demand interpretability in the sense of a-priori assessments of agent behavior to identify safe or failure-prone interactions with environments. To address this limitation, we propose SALSA-RL (Stability Analysis in the Latent Space of Actions), a novel RL framework that models control actions as dynamic, time-dependent variables evolving within a latent space. By employing a pre-trained encoder-decoder and a state-dependent linear system, our approach enables interpretability through local stability analysis, where instantaneous growth in action-norms can be predicted before their execution. We demonstrate that SALSA-RL can be deployed in a non-invasive manner for assessing the local stability of actions from pretrained RL agents without compromising on performance across diverse benchmark environments. By enabling a more interpretable analysis of action generation, SALSA-RL provides a powerful tool for advancing the design, analysis, and theoretical understanding of RL systems.

Bio: Romit Maulik is an Assistant Professor in the College of Information Sciences and Technology at Pennsylvania State University (Penn State). He is also a co-hire in the Institute for Computational and Data Sciences at Penn State and a Joint Appointment Faculty at Argonne National Laboratory. He obtained his PhD in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Oklahoma State University (in 2019) and was the Margaret Butler Postdoctoral Fellow (from 2019-2021) before becoming an Assistant Computational Scientist at Argonne National Laboratory (from 2021-2023). His group studies high-performance multifidelity scientific machine learning algorithm development with applications to various multiphysical nonlinear dynamical systems such as those that arise in fluid dynamics, geophysical modeling, nuclear fusion, and beyond. He is an Early Career Awardee of the Army Research Office.