Call for papers
Safe RL Workshop Topics
When seeking to apply RL algorithms in long-term, real world applications, they must come with analysis or guarantees about their performance and cost to the end-user, the environment, and the embodiment (e.g. robot) in which it is embedded. To bring about such safety guarantees in RL, we are organising the Safe RL 2022 workshop at IJCAI 2022. The goal of the workshop is to bring together researchers that are working on safe reinforcement learning systems, where safety is defined widely as avoiding self-harm, harm to the environment, significant financial or societal costs, and violations of social, ethical, or legal norms.
With this notion of safety in mind, we encourage submissions in extended abstract style on the following topics:
Definitions of safety
Incorporating safety, social norms, user preferences into RL policies
Safe exploration
Runtime verification and runtime enforcement
Satisfying safety constraints in non-stationary environments
Predicting safety constraint violations
Interventions to prevent failures when RL agent is at risk with no safe options left
Simulation platforms and data sets to help safe RL application use cases, demonstrations or problem statements.
We particularly welcome use cases in robotics and virtual applications.Application use cases, demonstrations or problem statements. We particularly welcome use cases in robotics and virtual applications.
Governmental policies or other aspects of the wider context to develop safety standards into artificial intelligence systems.
The call is open to submissions from a variety of disciplines relevant for safe RL, including but not limited to constrained optimisation, control theory, robust optimisation, human-robot interaction, formal methods, industrial robotics, and societal perspectives.
Submission guidelines
Submissions should be anonymous and use the IJCAI author kit (see https://www.ijcai.org/authors_kit). Each paper submitted should be at most 3 pages in the IJCAI double-column format. The 3 page limit includes references; for example, you can add half a page of references only if your document is at most two and a half page long.
Paper submission will take place through EasyChair. Please go to https://easychair.org/my/conference?conf=saferl2022 and click on "make a new submission" to start your submission.
Authors are welcome to submit supplementary information with details on their implementation; however, reviewers are not required to consult this additional material when assessing the submission.
The workshop will allow for the submission of papers similar to papers being concurrently submitted elsewhere, as the aim of the workshop is to get an overview of the relevant ongoing work in Safe RL. However, be aware that this has to be OK for the other venue for publication as well. Note that the papers will be showcased on the website rather than on the formal proceedings so this should generally be OK.
Double blind review
Authors are required to submit their paper anonymously. To submit anonymously, all names and affiliations must be removed from the paper. This also involves removing any linked pages with personal identifiers (e.g. github code).
Each submission will be reviewed by at least two reviewers, who will assess the submission based on relevance, novelty, impact, and technical soundness. Reviewers are asked to provide written feedback and a 1-to-5 score for each of the four criteria. Submissions with an overall score of 3.5 (i.e. the score averaged over all four criteria) or more are accepted for publication so reviewers are advised to take this into account when formulating their score. There will be no rebuttal period.
Oral presentation
Authors should present their accepted papers at the workshop, either physically or virtually. If the number of submissions is large, then only the highest-scoring accepted papers will be presented as a contributed talk while the remaining accepted papers will be presented during poster sessions.
To be able to present, authors must register for the IJCAI 2022 conference.
Important dates
May 13, 2022: Workshop Paper Due Date
June 3, 2022: Notification of Paper Acceptance
June 17, 2022: Camera-ready papers due
July 24, 2022: Safe RL workshop @ IJCAI 2022