arXiv AI By Ruihan Wu, Rui Yang, Donggeon David Oh, Duy Nguyen, Haimin Hu

Turning Safety into Competence: Minimally Exploitable Robot Policies via Safety-Filtered Reinforcement Learning

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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.

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