arXiv AI

SEVI: Safe Evidential Real-World Reinforcement Learning

SEVI (Safe Evidential Real-World Reinforcement Learning) is a framework that adds a safety intervention layer to real‑world policy learning. It uses an Evidential Safety Critic to estimate both future constraint‑violation risk and epistemic uncertainty in a single forward pass, and overrides unsafe or poorly supported actions with an offline‑trained recovery policy. Experiments on simulated manipulation tasks and a real‑world USB insertion task show that SEVI improves trajectory‑level safety prediction, task success, and reduces unsafe events by 13.4–57.1% compared to other safe RL baselines.

arXiv AI
Sep 24

Turning Safety into Competence: Minimally Exploitable Robot Policies via Safety-Filtered Reinforcement Learning

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 Machine Learning
5d ago

RBGA: Residual-Budget Guide Arbitration for Offline-to-Online Safe Reinforcement Learning in Dexterous Manipulation

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 AI
Aug 12

Threat-guided Policy-aware Scene Perturbation for Safe Autonomous Driving with Online Reinforcement Learning

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)
arXiv AI
Sep 15

Evaluation Metrics for Safe Reinforcement Learning

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