arXiv AI

SHAPO: Sharpness-Aware Policy Optimization for Safe Exploration

arXiv:2606. 10228v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Safe exploration is a prerequisite for deploying reinforcement learning (RL) agents in safety-critical domains.

arXiv AI
Aug 26

RePolicy: Reinforcement Learning for Safety-Policy Invocation in Agent Safeguards

RePolicy is a reinforcement learning approach designed to invoke safety policies for language model agents by evaluating entire execution trajectories within context-dependent policy libraries. It generates policy-grounded rationales and safety judgments, and is initialized with the PolicyTraj-20K dataset before fine-tuning via GRPO with verifiable rewards and policy-context perturbation. Experiments on six safety benchmarks demonstrate strong safety-detection performance and robust policy invocation across varying contexts.

By Houcheng Jiang, Boxuan Zhang, Qiyong Zhong, Junfeng Fang, Xiang Wang, Xiangnan He
arXiv AI
Jun 8

Exploring Agentic Tool-Calling Decisions via Uncertainty-Aligned Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606. 06976v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM)-based agents often make suboptimal tool-use decisions, including unsupported tool invocation and hallucinated direct responses, which may accumulate errors throughout multi-step interactions.

By Yijin Zhou, Linqian Zeng, Xiaoya Lu, Wenyuan Xie, Dongrui Liu, Junchi Yan, Jing Shao
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
Aug 19

Quantifying Risk Under Evolving Uncertainty: Belief-Dependent Robustness for Safe Sequential Decision Making

The paper introduces RATTL (Risk-Adversarial Total-Reward Learning), a framework that adjusts an agent’s caution based on epistemic uncertainty by using a Bayesian posterior over dynamics and a Wasserstein ambiguity set whose radius depends on that posterior. As evidence accumulates, the radius shrinks, smoothly transitioning the agent’s behavior from worst-case robustness to risk-neutral reward maximization. The authors prove a Safety Sandwich theorem showing RATTL’s value lies between the uninformed robust value and the full-knowledge optimum, and demonstrate the method on a binary-hazard example where the criterion reduces to Conditional Value-at-Risk.

By Deep Kumar Ganguly, Jan Kretinsky
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)