arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 9

FAITH: Feasibility-Aware Safety-Filtered RL for High-Dimensional Systems

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.

By Songyuan Zhang, Baljeet Singh, Sarthak Ranjeet Kaingade, Chuchu Fan, Bryan Trinh
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
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 28

Arrive and Survive: Scaling Safe Goal-Conditioned Policy Learning from One-Bit Failure Signals

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.

By Guopeng Li, Yiyang Duan, Yiru Jiao, Chengcheng Xu