Aug 2026· Applied Sciences· Vol 16, pp. 8113· 0 citations· 17 references
TL;DR
DynBudget, a closed-loop Safe RL framework integrating a learned safety critic, temperature-calibrated risk estimation, and a dynamic safety budget, is proposed and it is shown that shielding with dynamic budgets is an interpretable and viable approach to Safe RL in autonomous systems.
Abstract
Ensuring safety constraint satisfaction in non-stationary Reinforcement Learning (RL) environments remains a major challenge, as distribution drift can quickly invalidate previously calibrated risk estimates. To address this issue, we propose DynBudget, a closed-loop Safe RL framework integrating a learned safety critic, temperature-calibrated risk estimation, and a dynamic safety budget. By jointly adjusting the calibration temperature and the intervention threshold based on real-time violation feedback, the safety shield enables rapid adaptation to environmental drifts. We carried out experiments in two stages to fully evaluate the adaptation mechanism as well as the practical robustness of DynBudget. First, we studied the framework in a number of discrete MiniGrid contexts, and then we tested it on various continuous robotic tasks in Safety-Gymnasium. Our empirical results indicate that our approach is able to effectively reduce safety violations, shorten recovery time after a drift, and preserve competitive task performance when faced with abrupt changes in hazards or physical perturbations. Finally, we show that shielding with dynamic budgets is an interpretable and viable approach to Safe RL in autonomous systems.
Ensuring safety in reinforcement learning under nonstationarity requires determining whether a learning system can safely adapt to forecasted environmental change within the required recovery horizon. Existing safe reinforcement learning methods typically assume stationary environments and do not explicitly consider adaptation speed as a safety concern. However, when environments evolve over time, delayed adaptation may result in transient unsafe behavior. This paper proposes adjustment speed as a safety constraint for nonstationary reinforcement learning. The central idea is to define safety in terms of adaptation feasibility: future states or regions may become unsafe when the adaptation required to remain safe exceeds the learning system's calibrated recovery capacity. The proposed framework uses learned context representations and short-horizon context forecasts to estimate adaptation demand and compare it with the agent's achievable adaptation capacity. When predicted adaptation demand exceeds the calibrated recovery capacity, the framework proactively tightens the admissible action set and activates an action-level shield to reduce unsafe behavior before violations occur. Experiments in a nonstationary driving environment show that the proposed approach primarily reduces safety violations in short-horizon windows aligned with context changes. Ablation studies further show that shielding is more conservative for peak- and tail-risk suppression, while optimization-level adjustment provides additional reductions in short-horizon switch-conditioned violations. These results support adaptation feasibility as a practical safety principle for reinforcement learning under nonstationarity and demonstrate that proactive intervention can improve safety during periods of environmental change.
A counterexample-guided reinforcement learning method that navigates safe exploration in autonomous systems without prior knowledge, even when safety and optimality conflict, and a novel belief-based regularization method to address the distributional shift between online and offline learning and to balance optimization and safety.
Xiaotong Ji, Antonio Filieri· ACM Transactions on Autonomo...· 0 citations
Training reinforcement-learning agents directly on physical robots makes every fall costly, since a fall can damage the platform and cannot be undone like a simulator reset; the goal is therefore to minimize falls during training rather than trade them off against return, as constrained Markov decision process (MDP) formulations do. A standard mitigation hands control to a separate recovery policy whenever the agent leaves a designer-specified safe region (a subset of state space it should stay within), but the resulting mixed-policy rollouts silently bias every on-policy update, and the importance-sampling correction that would remove this bias is ill-defined whenever the recovery policy is deterministic. We address this bias with a drop-in modification of proximal policy optimization (PPO). Its core is an unbiased policy-gradient estimator that uses the score function only at safe timesteps and never evaluates the recovery policy's density, so it stays valid even when the recovery policy is deterministic, exactly where importance sampling breaks, and it empirically dominates importance sampling even when the recovery policy is stochastic. Because the recovery policy still makes credit assignment slow near the safe-region boundary, two further components accelerate learning: a closed-form value for recovery-triggering states when dynamics and recovery are deterministic, and an imitation loss that copies recovery actions only when recovery succeeds. On a three-environment, five-seed benchmark, the resulting algorithm reduces training-time falls by factors of 233x, 48x, and 26x on HalfCheetah, Ant, and Unitree Go1 over standard PPO, while matching or exceeding PPO's final reward, and on Ant, where the recovery policy is unreliable, it is the only method that reaches 80% of the best final reward.
E. Daneshmand, Majid Khadiv, Glen Berseth et al.· 0 citations
Comparative control theory analysis reveals a fundamental trade-off: transitioning from continuous to discrete rule-based control induces high-frequency Bang-Bang actuation and a stable bimodal limit cycle.
The AdaptSolveAI with SelfSolveNet framework provides a practical recipe for resilient and safety-aware autonomy by enabling continuous learning from unlabeled streams, adaptation within fixed computational budgets, and action execution under control barrier function-based safety constraints.
Nagunuri Rajender, Girish Reddy Ginni, K. Rayudu et al.· Scientific Reports· 0 citations
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