Safe Reinforcement Learning with Learned Non-Markovian Safety Constraints

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2405.03005v1
• Date: Sun, 5 May 2024 17:27:22 GMT
• Title: Safe Reinforcement Learning with Learned Non-Markovian Safety Constraints
• Authors: Siow Meng Low, Akshat Kumar,
• Abstract summary: We design a safety model that performs credit assignment to assess contributions of partial state-action trajectories on safety. We derive an effective algorithm for optimizing a safe policy using the learned safety model. We devise a method to dynamically adapt the tradeoff coefficient between safety reward and safety compliance.
• Score: 15.904640266226023
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: In safe Reinforcement Learning (RL), safety cost is typically defined as a function dependent on the immediate state and actions. In practice, safety constraints can often be non-Markovian due to the insufficient fidelity of state representation, and safety cost may not be known. We therefore address a general setting where safety labels (e.g., safe or unsafe) are associated with state-action trajectories. Our key contributions are: first, we design a safety model that specifically performs credit assignment to assess contributions of partial state-action trajectories on safety. This safety model is trained using a labeled safety dataset. Second, using RL-as-inference strategy we derive an effective algorithm for optimizing a safe policy using the learned safety model. Finally, we devise a method to dynamically adapt the tradeoff coefficient between reward maximization and safety compliance. We rewrite the constrained optimization problem into its dual problem and derive a gradient-based method to dynamically adjust the tradeoff coefficient during training. Our empirical results demonstrate that this approach is highly scalable and able to satisfy sophisticated non-Markovian safety constraints.

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