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 Machine Learning
Sep 21

Provably Optimal Reinforcement Learning under Safety Filtering

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