SAFTER: Safety-Aware Filtering Through Explicit Recoverability for Robust Reinforcement Learning under Distribution Shift
Read the original on arXiv Machine Learning →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Machine Learning.
The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Machine Learning.
arXiv:2605. 26452v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Safe reinforcement learning (RL) for robotic systems requires policies that improve task performance while satisfying state and input constraints during both training and deployment.
FAITH is a model‑free reinforcement learning framework that separates safety from task performance by using a learned safety filter. The filter approximates the optimal state‑action safety value with a feedforward network, allowing the task policy to optimize return through filtered dynamics without a competing safety term. Experiments on a double integrator, Safety Gym, a 29‑DoF humanoid, and a real Unitree G1 show that FAITH achieves high returns while maintaining near‑perfect safety and handling infeasible starts gracefully.
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.
The paper introduces Safe Contrastive Reinforcement Learning (Safe-CRL), a method that corrects bias in contrastive RL caused by failure-terminated Markov decision processes. By applying mass-weighted InfoNCE and a log-survival-mass score, Safe-CRL uses only a one-bit failure signal to improve survival and goal-reaching performance across twelve robot navigation and locomotion tasks. The approach demonstrates complex failure-avoidance behaviors and completes the theoretical foundation of contrastive RL under failure termination.
arXiv:2609. 12014v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safe offline reinforcement learning assumes a cost function on every transition.
arXiv:2606. 14415v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safe reinforcement learning (Safe RL) aims to maximize expected return while satisfying safety constraints, typically modeled as Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs).