Safe Reinforcement Learning in Black-Box Environments via Adaptive Shielding
Keywords: Reinforcement Learning, Safe Reinforcement Learning
TL;DR: Training RL agents in black-box environments without prior knowledge poses safety risks. Our ADVICE post-shielding technique identifies and avoids unsafe actions, thus reducing safety violations while maintaining a competitive outcome reward.
Abstract: Empowering safe exploration of reinforcement learning (RL) agents during training is a critical impediment towards deploying RL agents in many real-world scenarios. Training RL agents in unknown, black-box environments poses an even greater safety risk when prior knowledge of the domain/task is unavailable. We introduce ADVICE (Adaptive Shielding with a Contrastive Autoencoder), a novel post-shielding technique that distinguishes safe and unsafe features of state-action pairs during training, thus protecting the RL agent from executing actions that yield potentially hazardous outcomes. Our comprehensive experimental evaluation against state-of-the-art safe RL exploration techniques demonstrates how ADVICE can significantly reduce safety violations during training while maintaining a competitive outcome reward.
Primary Area: reinforcement learning
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Submission Number: 3537
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