arXiv Machine Learning

LEAP-CBF: A Safety Filter for Uncertain Systems with Least-Effort Adversarial Potentials

The paper introduces LEAP-CBF, a safety filter that uses Least‑Effort Adversarial Potentials to quantify how much disturbance effort is needed to cause failure in nonlinear dynamical systems. LEAP serves as a control barrier function for the undisturbed system and can be combined with a robust safety filter that tolerates disturbances with bounded cumulative effort. The authors develop a deep reinforcement learning method to construct LEAPs and validate their effectiveness through simulations of multi‑agent systems and hardware experiments on a quadruped and quadrotors.

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 AI
Jul 3

Lightweight Safe Reinforcement Learning for End-to-End UAV Navigation

arXiv:2607. 01794v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: With the rapid development of autonomous aerial systems, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly deployed in applications such as inspection, environmental monitoring, and rescue, creating growing demand for reliable autonomous navigation.

By Shenghui Zhang, YuXuan Gao, Songwei Zhao, Jifeng Hu, Zijing Zhang, Hechang Chen
arXiv AI
Jun 4

Scenario Generation for Risk-Aware Reinforcement Learning with Probably Approximately Safe Guarantees

arXiv:2606. 04812v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Guaranteeing safety is critical to the deployment of reinforcement learning (RL) agents in the real-world, especially as policies learned using deep RL may demonstrate susceptibility to transition perturbations that result in unknown or unsafe behaviour.

By Mohit Prashant, Arvind Easwaran
arXiv AI
Aug 25

Robust Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Small UAS Separation Assurance under GPS Degradation and Spoofing

The paper presents a robust multi‑agent reinforcement learning framework for small unmanned aircraft systems (sUAS) to maintain separation assurance when GPS data is degraded or spoofed. By modeling state observation corruption as a zero‑sum game, the authors derive a closed‑form adversarial perturbation that eliminates iterative inner optimization and can be evaluated in linear time. Integrating this perturbation into a policy‑gradient MARL algorithm yields a counter‑policy that achieves near‑zero collision rates in high‑density simulations even with up to 35% observation corruption, outperforming non‑adversarial baselines.

By Alex Zongo, Filippos Fotiadis, Ufuk Topcu, Peng Wei
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 11

Uncertainty-Aware Predictive Safety Filters for Probabilistic Neural Network Dynamics

arXiv:2604. 26836v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Predictive safety filters (PSFs) leverage model predictive control to enforce constraint satisfaction during deep reinforcement learning (RL) exploration, yet their reliance on first-principles models or Gaussian processes limits scalability and broader applicability.

By Bernd Frauenknecht, Lukas Kesper, Daniel Mayfrank, Henrik Hose, Sebastian Trimpe
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 14

Robust Policy Optimization via Adversarial Importance Sampling

The paper introduces Adversarial Importance Sampling (Advis), a technique that leverages importance sampling over standard training trajectories to estimate and optimize worst‑case returns without extra environment interactions or auxiliary networks, thereby capturing long‑term robustness. It also presents advrl, a modular PyTorch library that consolidates existing robustness methods and adversarial attacks into single‑file implementations for easier prototyping and reproducible evaluation. Finally, the authors highlight that optimal adversarial hyperparameters do not transfer across agents, prompting evaluation against a broader set of attackers (6–14× more configurations) and demonstrate the effectiveness of their approach on continuous control tasks.

By Amine Andam, Jamal Bentahar, Mustapha Hedabou