Formal Synthesis of Certifiably Robust Neural Lyapunov-Barrier Certificates
- URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05311v1
- Date: Thu, 05 Feb 2026 05:08:01 GMT
- Title: Formal Synthesis of Certifiably Robust Neural Lyapunov-Barrier Certificates
- Authors: Chengxiao Wang, Haoze Wu, Gagandeep Singh,
- Abstract summary: We study the problem of synthesizing emphrobust neural Lyapunov barrier certificates that maintain their guarantees under perturbations in system dynamics.<n>We propose practical training objectives that enforce these conditions via adversarial training, Lipschitz neighborhood bound, and global Lipschitz regularization.<n>Our results demonstrate effectiveness of training robust neural certificates for safe RL under perturbations in dynamics.
- Score: 9.62123513414546
- License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
- Abstract: Neural Lyapunov and barrier certificates have recently been used as powerful tools for verifying the safety and stability properties of deep reinforcement learning (RL) controllers. However, existing methods offer guarantees only under fixed ideal unperturbed dynamics, limiting their reliability in real-world applications where dynamics may deviate due to uncertainties. In this work, we study the problem of synthesizing \emph{robust neural Lyapunov barrier certificates} that maintain their guarantees under perturbations in system dynamics. We formally define a robust Lyapunov barrier function and specify sufficient conditions based on Lipschitz continuity that ensure robustness against bounded perturbations. We propose practical training objectives that enforce these conditions via adversarial training, Lipschitz neighborhood bound, and global Lipschitz regularization. We validate our approach in two practically relevant environments, Inverted Pendulum and 2D Docking. The former is a widely studied benchmark, while the latter is a safety-critical task in autonomous systems. We show that our methods significantly improve both certified robustness bounds (up to $4.6$ times) and empirical success rates under strong perturbations (up to $2.4$ times) compared to the baseline. Our results demonstrate effectiveness of training robust neural certificates for safe RL under perturbations in dynamics.
Related papers
- BarrierSteer: LLM Safety via Learning Barrier Steering [83.12893815611052]
BarrierSteer is a novel framework that formalizes safety by embedding learned non-linear safety constraints directly into the model's latent representation space.<n>We show that BarrierSteer substantially reduces adversarial success rates, decreases unsafe generations, and outperforms existing methods.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2026-02-23T18:19:46Z) - Safe Reinforcement Learning via Recovery-based Shielding with Gaussian Process Dynamics Models [57.006252510102506]
Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful framework for optimal decision-making and control but often lacks provable guarantees for safety-critical applications.<n>We introduce a novel recovery-based shielding framework that enables safe RL with a provable safety lower bound for unknown and non-linear continuous dynamical systems.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2026-02-12T22:03:35Z) - Human-in-the-loop Online Rejection Sampling for Robotic Manipulation [55.99788088622936]
Hi-ORS stabilizes value estimation by filtering out negatively rewarded samples during online fine-tuning.<n>Hi-ORS fine-tunes a pi-base policy to master contact-rich manipulation in just 1.5 hours of real-world training.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2025-10-30T11:53:08Z) - Pruning Cannot Hurt Robustness: Certified Trade-offs in Reinforcement Learning [6.883578421923203]
We develop the first theoretical framework for certified robustness under pruning in state-adversarial Markov decision processes.<n>We derive a novel three-term regret decomposition that disentangles clean-task performance, pruning-induced performance loss, and robustness gains.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2025-10-14T19:35:27Z) - Viability of Future Actions: Robust Safety in Reinforcement Learning via Entropy Regularization [47.30677525394649]
We analyze the interplay between two well-established techniques in model-free reinforcement learning: entropy regularization and constraints penalization.<n>We show that entropy regularization in constrained RL inherently biases learning toward maximizing the number of future viable actions, thereby promoting constraints satisfaction robust to action noise.<n>We conclude that the connection between entropy regularization and robustness is a promising avenue for further empirical and theoretical investigation.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2025-06-12T16:34:19Z) - Safely Learning Controlled Stochastic Dynamics [61.82896036131116]
We introduce a method that ensures safe exploration and efficient estimation of system dynamics.<n>After training, the learned model enables predictions of the system's dynamics and permits safety verification of any given control.<n>We provide theoretical guarantees for safety and derive adaptive learning rates that improve with increasing Sobolev regularity of the true dynamics.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2025-06-03T11:17:07Z) - KCRL: Krasovskii-Constrained Reinforcement Learning with Guaranteed
Stability in Nonlinear Dynamical Systems [66.9461097311667]
We propose a model-based reinforcement learning framework with formal stability guarantees.
The proposed method learns the system dynamics up to a confidence interval using feature representation.
We show that KCRL is guaranteed to learn a stabilizing policy in a finite number of interactions with the underlying unknown system.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2022-06-03T17:27:04Z) - Adversarially Robust Stability Certificates can be Sample-Efficient [14.658040519472646]
We consider learning adversarially robust stability certificates for unknown nonlinear dynamical systems.
We show that the statistical cost of learning an adversarial stability certificate is equivalent, up to constant factors, to that of learning a nominal stability certificate.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2021-12-20T17:23:31Z) - Policy Smoothing for Provably Robust Reinforcement Learning [109.90239627115336]
We study the provable robustness of reinforcement learning against norm-bounded adversarial perturbations of the inputs.
We generate certificates that guarantee that the total reward obtained by the smoothed policy will not fall below a certain threshold under a norm-bounded adversarial of perturbation the input.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2021-06-21T21:42:08Z) - CROP: Certifying Robust Policies for Reinforcement Learning through
Functional Smoothing [41.093241772796475]
We present the first framework of Certifying Robust Policies for reinforcement learning (CROP) against adversarial state perturbations.
We propose two types of robustness certification criteria: robustness of per-state actions and lower bound of cumulative rewards.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2021-06-17T07:58:32Z) - Closing the Closed-Loop Distribution Shift in Safe Imitation Learning [80.05727171757454]
We treat safe optimization-based control strategies as experts in an imitation learning problem.
We train a learned policy that can be cheaply evaluated at run-time and that provably satisfies the same safety guarantees as the expert.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2021-02-18T05:11:41Z) - Neural Lyapunov Redesign [36.2939747271983]
Learning controllers must guarantee some notion of safety to ensure that it does not harm either the agent or the environment.
Lyapunov functions are effective tools to assess stability in nonlinear dynamical systems.
We propose a two-player collaborative algorithm that alternates between estimating a Lyapunov function and deriving a controller that gradually enlarges the stability region.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2020-06-06T19:22:20Z)
This list is automatically generated from the titles and abstracts of the papers in this site.
This site does not guarantee the quality of this site (including all information) and is not responsible for any consequences.