arXiv Machine Learning By Donggeon David Oh, Duy P. Nguyen, Haimin Hu, Jaime Fern\'andez Fisac

Provably Optimal Reinforcement Learning under Safety Filtering

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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.

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