arXiv AI

Safe-RULE: Safe Reinforcement UnLEarning

arXiv:2606. 09559v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Offline safe reinforcement learning (Safe RL) enables policy learning without online interactions, making it suitable for safety-critical systems such as robotics systems.

arXiv AI
Jun 9

Targeting World Models to Compromise Robot Learning Pipelines

arXiv:2606. 09499v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: World models have recently seen a rapid growth in both their popularity and capability as more data efficient tools for generating robot training data or simulating real world environments, with many works proposing their integration into the robot learning pipeline.

By Ethan Rathbun, Ahmed Agha, Saaduddin Mahmud, Christopher Amato, Alina Oprea, Eugene Bagdasarian
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
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
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 3

Phantom Transfer: Data Poisoning can Survive Data-Level Defences

arXiv:2602. 04899v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present a data poisoning attack -- Phantom Transfer -- with the property that, even if you know precisely how the poison was placed into an otherwise benign dataset, you cannot filter it out.

By Andrew Draganov, Tolga H. Dur, Anandmayi Bhongade, Mary Phuong
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 7

When Can You Poison Rewards? A Tight Characterization of Reward Poisoning in Linear MDPs

arXiv:2604. 10062v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study reward poisoning attacks in reinforcement learning (RL), where an adversary manipulates rewards within constrained budgets to force the target RL agent to adopt a policy that aligns with the attacker's objectives.

By Jose Efraim Aguilar Escamilla, Haoyang Hong, Jiawei Li, Haoyu Zhao, Xuezhou Zhang, Sanghyun Hong, Huazheng Wang