Safe Reinforcement Learning via Confidence-Based Filters

Autor: Curi, Sebastian, Lederer, Armin, Hirche, Sandra, Krause, Andreas
Rok vydání: 2022
Předmět:
Druh dokumentu: Working Paper
Popis: Ensuring safety is a crucial challenge when deploying reinforcement learning (RL) to real-world systems. We develop confidence-based safety filters, a control-theoretic approach for certifying state safety constraints for nominal policies learned via standard RL techniques, based on probabilistic dynamics models. Our approach is based on a reformulation of state constraints in terms of cost functions, reducing safety verification to a standard RL task. By exploiting the concept of hallucinating inputs, we extend this formulation to determine a "backup" policy that is safe for the unknown system with high probability. Finally, the nominal policy is minimally adjusted at every time step during a roll-out towards the backup policy, such that safe recovery can be guaranteed afterwards. We provide formal safety guarantees, and empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.
Databáze: arXiv