The paper introduces Safety to Competence (S2C), a two‑stage reinforcement learning framework that first learns a safety filter and then trains a competitive task policy while embedding the filter. By separating safety synthesis from task learning, S2C reduces training complexity and prevents the policy from being exploited by adversarial attacks. Experiments on simulated touchdown games show that S2C achieves higher win rates, better Elo ratings, and lower exploitability than eight safe‑RL baselines, and hardware tests confirm its competence against a human opponent.
By Ruihan Wu, Rui Yang, Donggeon David Oh, Duy Nguyen, Haimin Hu
arXiv:2606. 31320v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safe online reinforcement learning requires policies to respect safety constraints while maintaining smooth optimization dynamics.
By Hongpeng Cao, Liqun Zhao, Yuliang Gu, Naira Hovakimyan, Lui Sha, Marco Caccamo
The paper introduces RBGA, an algorithm for offline-to-online safe reinforcement learning in dexterous manipulation. RBGA tracks the remaining safety budget during an episode and uses it to arbitrate between offline guidance and an evolving online policy, comparing cost-to-go estimates at each step. The authors provide theoretical analysis of safety implications and demonstrate through experiments that RBGA improves online policy performance while preserving safety.
By Zongyou Yu, Ao Zhou, Xiongbo Shi, Jiayi Guan, Shihang Du, Xudong Zhang, Shangding Gu, Junqiao Zhao, Hanli Wang, Guang Chen
arXiv:2606.22278v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Ensuring safety of learning-enabled robotic manipulation across diverse embodiments and tasks still requires significant manual engineering....
By Alex Beaudin, Hanna Krasowski, Kartik Nagpal, Sanjit A. Seshia, Murat Arcak, Negar Mehr
arXiv:2607. 12784v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement Learning has revolutionized the landscape of robotic research, allowing robust learning of complex robotic skills in simulation.
By Paolo Magliano, Puze Liu, Jan Peters, Davide Tateo, Raffaello Camoriano
arXiv:2606. 10228v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Safe exploration is a prerequisite for deploying reinforcement learning (RL) agents in safety-critical domains.
By Kaustubh Mani, Yann Pequignot, Vincent Mai, Liam Paull
arXiv:2607. 07252v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) enables the synthesis of control policies directly from data, making it highly appealing for complex cyber-physical systems (CPSs) and robotics.
By Georg Sch\"afer, Jakob Rehrl, Stefan Huber, Simon Hirlaender
arXiv:2608. 10403v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown promising performance in autonomous driving, yet ensuring the safety of online RL policies remains challenging due to insufficient exposure to safety-critical driving scenes.
By Xincong Hu (Nanjing University), Lei Ou (Nanjing University), Maosen Li (Yinwang Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd), Jingtao Zhang (Yinwang Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd), Liguo Hou (Yinwang Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd), Zongzhang Zhang (Nanjing University)
The paper introduces new evaluation metrics for safe reinforcement learning that go beyond average safety guarantees by examining how often and how severely safety bounds are violated, consistency across tasks and bounds, and the relationship between training-time and final policy behavior. It also proposes a safety tier system for categorizing algorithms and presents empirical safety evaluations on multiple navigation tasks. The authors recommend reporting aggregate metrics, distributional data, and task‑specific results together, and provide an open‑source suite, SafeRLEval, to facilitate reliable safety assessment.
By Lindsay Spoor, Aske Plaat, Thomas Moerland
Reinforcement Learning has revolutionized the landscape of robotic research, allowing robust learning of complex robotic skills in simulation. However, real-world deployment in open-ended environments requires strong safety guarantees to prevent dangerous or harmful behaviors.
arXiv:2609.13231v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models demonstrate strong generalization in robotic manipulation and navigation, but existing fine-tuning methods provid...
By Manan Tayal, Akshay Nambi
arXiv:2606. 14536v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safe reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn policies that optimize rewards while satisfying constraints.
By Kai S. Yun, Zeyang Li, Navid Azizan