The paper introduces RecReg, a safe reinforcement learning framework that enforces non‑Markovian regular safety properties through recovery‑based shielding. It provides theoretical foundations and rigorous safety and convergence guarantees in the tabular setting, and demonstrates empirical effectiveness using the MASA‑Safe‑RL library. The authors also outline an extension of RecReg to deep RL with state‑of‑the‑art model‑based methods.
By Alexander W. Goodall, Francesco Belardinelli
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
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
The paper proves that using a permissive safety filter in reinforcement learning does not compromise asymptotic performance. By formalizing safety through a safety‑critical Markov decision process and a filtered MDP, the authors show that optimal policies in the filtered MDP achieve the same return as the best safe policy in the original setting. Experiments on Safety Gymnasium confirm zero violations during training and performance that matches or exceeds unfiltered baselines.
By Donggeon David Oh, Duy P. Nguyen, Haimin Hu, Jaime Fern\'andez Fisac
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
arXiv:2601. 19612v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Safe exploration is a key requirement for reinforcement learning (RL) agents to learn and adapt online, beyond controlled (e.
By Manuel Wendl, Yarden As, Manish Prajapat, Anton Pollak, Stelian Coros, Andreas Krause
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.
By Shaekh Mohammad Shithil, Lantao Liu
arXiv:2509. 25582v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In-context reinforcement learning (ICRL) is an emerging RL paradigm where an agent, after pretraining, can adapt to out-of-distribution test tasks without any parameter updates, instead relying on an expanding context of interaction history.
By Amir Moeini, Minjae Kwon, Alper Kamil Bozkurt, Yuichi Motai, Rohan Chandra, Lu Feng, Shangtong Zhang
arXiv:2603. 15136v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Offline safe reinforcement learning (RL) seeks reward-maximizing policies from static datasets under strict safety constraints.
By Mumuksh Tayal, Manan Tayal, Ravi Prakash
The paper introduces Exchange Policy Optimization (EPO), a framework for semi‑infinite safe reinforcement learning that handles infinitely many constraints by iteratively solving finite subproblems. EPO expands or deletes constraints based on tolerance violations and Lagrange multipliers, maintaining computational tractability while converging to an optimal policy with bounded safety violations. The authors prove finite convergence, provide iteration bounds, and quantify the suboptimality gap under mild assumptions.
By Jiaming Zhang, Yujie Yang, Haoning Wang, Liping Zhang, Shengbo Eben Li
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.