Feasibility-Aware Pessimistic Estimation: Toward Long-Horizon Safety in Offline RL

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2505.08179v2
• Date: Tue, 20 May 2025 16:40:42 GMT
• Title: Feasibility-Aware Pessimistic Estimation: Toward Long-Horizon Safety in Offline RL
• Authors: Zhikun Tao, Gang Xiong, He Fang, Zhen Shen, Yunjun Han, Qing-Shan Jia,
• Abstract summary: We propose a novel framework Feasibility-Aware offline Safe Reinforcement Learning with CVAE-based Pessimism (FASP)<n>We employ Hamilton-Jacobi (H-J) reachability analysis to generate reliable safety labels.<n>We also utilize pessimistic estimation methods to estimate the Q-value of reward and cost.
• Score: 14.767273209148545
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Offline safe reinforcement learning(OSRL) derives constraint-satisfying policies from pre-collected datasets, offers a promising avenue for deploying RL in safety-critical real-world domains such as robotics. However, the majority of existing approaches emphasize only short-term safety, neglecting long-horizon considerations. Consequently, they may violate safety constraints and fail to ensure sustained protection during online deployment. Moreover, the learned policies often struggle to handle states and actions that are not present or out-of-distribution(OOD) from the offline dataset, and exhibit limited sample efficiency. To address these challenges, we propose a novel framework Feasibility-Aware offline Safe Reinforcement Learning with CVAE-based Pessimism (FASP). First, we employ Hamilton-Jacobi (H-J) reachability analysis to generate reliable safety labels, which serve as supervisory signals for training both a conditional variational autoencoder (CVAE) and a safety classifier. This approach not only ensures high sampling efficiency but also provides rigorous long-horizon safety guarantees. Furthermore, we utilize pessimistic estimation methods to estimate the Q-value of reward and cost, which mitigates the extrapolation errors induces by OOD actions, and penalize unsafe actions to enabled the agent to proactively avoid high-risk behaviors. Moreover, we theoretically prove the validity of this pessimistic estimation. Extensive experiments on DSRL benchmarks demonstrate that FASP algorithm achieves competitive performance across multiple experimental tasks, particularly outperforming state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of safety.

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